53·2d. Cæsars Camp upon Barham Down. drawn 10. Oct. 1722.
W. Stukeley delin.
E. Kirkall sculp.
This being the first form of the city, its proportion of length to breadth was as 3 to 2. Now, for the cross streets, I conceive one to have been that of St. Martin’s lane from Aldersgate continued downward to Paul’s wharf; the next was from Aldermanbury and Bow-lane, to Queenhithe: the other, Walbroke to Dowgate, or Watergate, being the outfall of the rivulet; boundary of the eastern wall of the original city, as in in the time of Mandubrace. The street which accompanied the western wall, on the inside Ludgate, is quite absorbed by houses at present.
There might then have been many lesser cross streets both ways, of which we cannot now take any account, our purpose being to consider it only in the great; but there are many collateral indications of the justness of our assignment: it would be a trifling minuteness to push conjectures farther, than to observe the gate on the south side was at Queen-hithe.
Thus we see a great conformity between old London and Cunobeline’s Cæsaromagus, especially as to the general distribution and design; the four gates of the sides corresponding to different streets obliquely.
Afterwards, when the Romans became possessed of the island, and made the great roads across the kingdom, three of them had respect to this metropolis, but none went precisely through it; and such was often their method. The Watling-street, from Chester to Dover, came by Tyburn, crossed the Thames at Stanegate, by Lambeth, and so to Shooters’ hill: this is crossed at Tyburn by another equally strait, but unnoticed by any writer, reaching across the kingdom from Chichester to Dunwich in Suffolk: I call it via Iceniana: it goes by Old-street north of the city, and is the high road of Essex to Colchester; but, when the Romans found it useful to enlarge this city by a new wall, they made a branch to proceed from St. Giles’s, which we call Holborn, and so built a gate at Newgate, and continued the road to Cheapside.
A third road is the Hermen-street from the sea-side in Sussex to Scotland: it went by Bishops-gate, but on the eastern and outside of the city, till its enlargement; and that enlargement was done by Constantine the Great, or by his mother the empress Helena, our country-woman: and we may well credit the reports of the Britons concerning this matter. Then it acquired the title of Londinium Augusta: then it was that the Tower was built; an armamentarium, as the castle of Colchester, of the same manner and model of building, Roman brick and stone; a chapel with a semicircular window, as Colchester, and dedicated to St. Helena. This in after-times; but in regard to the age we are treating on, that of Cæsar and our aboriginal Britons, it is a just enquiry, after we have given the plan of primitive London of the Novantes, Where may we suppose their temple to have been? for assuredly we must pronounce, that, whenever the ancients built a city, they certainly took care to erect a temple for divine worship.