Old and New London, Volume I / A Narrative of Its History, Its People, and Its Places

by Walter Thornbury

PART OF OLD LONDON WALL, NEAR FALCON SQUARE

The Mandubert who sought Cæsar's help is by some thought to be the son of the semi-fabulous King Lud (King Brown), the mythical founder of London, and, according to Milton, who, as we have said, follows the old historians, a descendant of Brute of Troy. The successor of the warlike Cassivellaunus had his capital at St. Alban's; his son Cunobelin (Shakespeare's Cymbeline)—a name which seems to glow with perpetual sunshine as we write it—had a palace at Colchester; and the son of Cunobelin was the famed Caradoc, or Caractacus, that hero of the Silures, who struggled bravely for nine long years against the generals of Rome.

Celtic etymologists differ, as etymologists usually do, about the derivation of the name of London. Lon, or Long, meant, they say, either a lake, a wood, a populous place, a plain, or a ship-town. This last conjecture is, however, now the most generally received, as it at once gives the modern pronunciation, to which Llyn-don would never have assimilated. The first British town was indeed a simple Celtic hill fortress, formed first on Tower Hill, and afterwards continued to Cornhill and Ludgate. It was moated on the south by the river, which it controlled; by fens on the north; and on the east by the marshy low ground of Wapping. It was a high, dry, and fortified point of communication between the river and the inland country of Essex and Hertfordshire, a safe sixty miles from the sea, and central as a depôt and meeting-place for the tribes of Kent and Middlesex.

Hitherto the London about which we have been conjecturing has been a mere cloud city. The first mention of real London is by Tacitus, who, writing in the reign of Nero (A.D. 62, more than a century after the landing of Cæsar), in that style of his so full of vigour and so sharp in outline, that it seems fit rather to be engraved on steel than written on perishable paper, says that Londinium, though not, indeed, dignified with the name of colony, was a place highly celebrated for the number of its merchants and the confluence of traffic. In the year 62 London was probably still without walls, and its inhabitants were not Roman citizens, like those of Verulamium (St. Alban's). When the Britons, roused by the wrongs of the fierce Boadicea (Queen of the Iceni, the people of Norfolk and Suffolk), bore down on London, her back still "bleeding from the Roman rods," she slew in London and Verulamium alone 70,000 citizens and allies of Rome; impaling many beautiful and well-born women, amid revelling sacrifices, in the grove of Andate, the British Goddess of Victory. It is supposed that after this reckless slaughter the tigress and her savage followers burned the cluster of wooden houses that then formed London to the ground. Certain it is, that when deep sections were made for a sewer in Lombard Street in 1786, the lowest stratum consisted of tesselated Roman pavements, their coloured dice laying scattered like flower leaves, and above that of a thick layer of wood ashes, as of the débris of charred wooden buildings. This ruin the Romans avenged by the slaughter of 80,000 Britons in a butchering fight, generally believed to have taken place at King's Cross (otherwise Battle Bridge), after which the fugitive Boadicea, in rage and despair, took poison and perished.

London probably soon sprang, phœnix-like, from the fire, though history leaves it in darkness to enjoy a lull of 200 years. In the early part of the second century Ptolemy, the geographer, speaks of it as a city of the Kentish people; but Mr. Craik very ingeniously conjectures that the Greek writer took his information from Phœnician works descriptive of Britain, written before even the invasion of Cæsar. Theodosius, a general of the Emperor Valentinian, who saved London from gathered hordes of Scots, Picts, Franks, and Saxons, is supposed to have repaired the walls of London, which had been first built by the Emperor Constantine early in the fourth century. In the reign of Theodosius, London, now called Augusta, became one of the chief, if not the chief, of the seventy Roman cities in Britain. In the famous "Itinerary" of Antoninus (about the end of the third century) London stands as the goal or starting-point of seven out of the fifteen great central Roman roads in England. Camden considers the London Stone, now enshrined in the south wall of St. Swithin's Church, Cannon Street, to have been the central milestone of Roman England, from which all the chief roads radiated, and by which the distances were reckoned. Wren supposed that Watling Street, of which Cannon Street is a part, was the High Street of Roman London. Another street ran west along Holborn from Cheapside, and from Cheapside probably north. A northern road ran by Aldgate, and probably Bishopsgate. The road from Dover came either over a bridge near the site of the present London Bridge, or higher up at Dowgate, from Stoney Street on the Surrey side.

Early Roman London was scarcely larger than Hyde Park. Mr. Roach Smith, the best of all authorities on the subject, gives its length from the Tower to Ludgate, east and west, at about a mile; and north and south, that is from London Wall to the Thames, at about half a mile. The earliest Roman city was even smaller, for Roman sepulchres have been found in Bow Lane, Moorgate Street, Bishopsgate Within, which must at that time have been beyond the walls. The Roman cemeteries of Smithfield, St. Paul's, Whitechapel, the Minories, and Spitalfields, are of later dates, and are in all cases beyond the old line of circumvallation, according to the sound Roman custom fixed by law. The earlier London Mr. Roach Smith describes as an irregular space, the five main gates corresponding with Bridgegate, Ludgate, Bishopsgate, Aldersgate, and Aldgate. The north wall followed for some part the course of Cornhill and Leadenhall Street; the eastern Billiter Street and Mark Lane; the southern Thames Street; and the western the east side of Walbrook. Of the larger Roman wall, there were within the memory of man huge, shapeless masses, with trees growing upon them, opposite what is now Finsbury Circus. In 1852 a piece of Roman wall on Tower Hill was rescued from the improvers, and built into some stables and outhouses; but not before a careful sketch had been effected by the late Mr. Fairholt, one of the best of our antiquarian draughtsmen. The later Roman London was in general outline the same in shape and size as the London of the Saxons and Normans. The newer walls Pennant calculates at 3 miles 165 feet in circumference, they were 22 feet high, and guarded with forty lofty towers. At the end of the last century large portions of the old Roman wall were traceable in many places, but time has devoured almost the last morsels of that great pièce de résistance. In 1763 Mr. Gough made a drawing of a square Roman tower (one of three) then standing in Houndsditch. It was built in alternate layers of massive square stones and red tiles. The old loophole for the sentinel had been enlarged into a square latticed window. In 1857, while digging foundations for houses on the north-east side of Aldermanbury Postern, the workmen came on a portion of the Roman wall strengthened by blind arches. All that now substantially remains of the old fortification is a bastion in St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate; a fragment in St. Martin's Court, off Ludgate Hill; another portion exists in the Old Bailey, concealed behind houses; and a fourth, near George Street, Tower Hill. Portions of the wall have, however, been also broached in Falcon Square (one of which we have engraved), Bush Lane, Scott's Yard, and Cornhill, and others built in cellars and warehouses from opposite the Tower and Cripplegate.

The line of the Roman walls ran from the Tower straight to Aldgate; there making an angle, it continued to Bishopsgate. From there it turned eastward to St. Giles's Churchyard, where it veered south to Falcon Square. At this point it continued west to Aldersgate, running under Christ's Hospital, and onward to Giltspur Street. There forming an angle, it proceeded directly to Ludgate towards the Thames, passing to the south of St. Andrew's Church. The wall then crossed Addle Street, and took a course along Upper and Lower Thames Street towards the Tower. In Thames Street the wall has been found built on oaken piles; on these was laid a stratum of chalk and stones, and over this a course of large, hewn sandstones, cemented with quicklime, sand, and pounded tile. The body of the wall was constructed of ragstone, flint, and lime, bonded at intervals with courses of plain and curve-edged tiles.

That Roman London grew slowly there is abundant proof. In building the new Exchange, the workmen came on a gravel-pit full of oyster-shells, cattle bones, old sandals, and shattered pottery. No coin found there being later than Severus indicates that this ground was bare waste outside the original city until at least the latter part of the third century. How far Roman London eventually spread its advancing waves of houses may be seen from the fact that Roman wall-paintings, indicating villas of men of wealth and position, have been found on both sides of High Street, Southwark, almost up to St. George's Church; while one of the outlying Roman cemeteries bordered the Kent Road.