As the 2012 Olympics open, motorcades of dignitaries, politicians, company CEOs and celebrities will sweep through East London on the specially cleared executive super-highway to Stratford that is only open to them. A few yards away, in damp and overcrowded blocks of flats, Black, white, and Asian workers will be preparing to go to work, if they are lucky, in jobs that pay a pittance. Perhaps they will be serving coffee to, or clearing up after, those very same people. For centuries in London such contrasting conditions have produced riots and radicalism, strikes and socialism. That history is unlikely to be over.
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Origins
Llyn Din: the City of the Lake.
Celtic origin of Londinium
LONDINIUM
London was established by invaders: the Romans. There were pre-Roman settlements in the Thames valley, including in the area of modern London, but it was not until after the Roman invasion of AD 43 that a large urban area was settled. After landing on the Kent coast, the II Augusta, XIV Gemina, XX Valeria, and IX Hispana legions crossed the Thames at the same point before breaking into separate units as they continued north and west, almost unopposed at first. There were two subsequent, and decisive, battles, both of which the Romans won. London was born as a military supply base.
Londinium became established as a Roman trading centre over the following two decades. Its location had some natural advantages. It was at the furthest point inland where the Thames was still a tidal river, and therefore was readily accessible for sea-going ships; yet it was also the easternmost point where it was possible to cross the river easily. At some point in the second century AD the Romans were the first to bridge the Thames, at the site of the modern London Bridge. Here on the south bank of the river – what would become Southwark – there then lay two large islands with minor channels of the Thames flowing south of them. On the ground that rose above the surrounding marshes it was possible to build approach roads, like that from the already important town of Canterbury. The north bank, on the hills that would come to be known as Ludgate Hill and Cornhill, provided raised ground on which buildings could be safely constructed.
London was an advantageous location for a Roman settlement for other reasons. Londinium gave the Roman army access to corn from the rich farmland nearby. Fairly powerful tribes in the surrounding area had submitted to Roman rule whereas tribes in the West, Wales and, later, the North were actively hostile. The Thames itself was also a major attraction, for in the ancient world water connected more than it separated people. Within a decade of the invasion quays were being established along the Thames, and soon perhaps 10,000 people lived in the area between the crossing to Southwark and the western side of the Walbrook River, now vanished underground, but which entered the Thames near modern-day Cannon Street station. On the south side of the crossing, granaries, bakeries and workshops sprang up. The Roman historian Tacitus admired the teeming settlement, ‘crowded with merchants and goods’.
The native Britons’ first significant contribution to the history of London was to destroy it. In AD 60, seventeen years after the Roman invasion, the Iceni tribe swept out of their territory in the East Anglian heartland, destroying the Roman city of Colchester (Camulodunum) and then London. The Iceni had good reasons for their hostility. Following the invasion, the Romans had not conquered the Iceni but made a pact with their king, Prasutagus. On his death, however, Roman policy hardened towards them, a fact even Tacitus could hardly disguise. Tacitus records that Prasutagus ‘in the course of a long reign had amassed considerable wealth’, which he left in his will ‘to his two daughters and the emperor in equal shares’. This Prasutagus thought would be enough to secure ‘the tranquility of his kingdom and his family’. In a masterpiece of understatement, Tacitus says ‘The event was otherwise’.
His dominions were ravaged by the centurions; the slaves pillaged his house, and his effects were seized as lawful plunder. His wife, Boudicca, was disgraced with cruel stripes; her daughters were ravished, and the most illustrious of the Icenians were, by force, deprived of the positions which had been transmitted to them by their ancestors. The whole country was considered as a legacy bequeathed to the plunderers. The relations of the deceased king were reduced to slavery.
Exasperated by their acts of violence, and dreading worse calamities, the Icenians had recourse to arms.1
Boudicca (Boadicea is a later corruption) made an alliance with ‘neighbouring states, not as yet taught to crouch in bondage’, who, says Tacitus, ‘pledged themselves, in secret councils, to stand forth in the cause of liberty’. We have some sense of the feelings that motivated the Iceni from Tacitus’s account of Boudicca’s speech at a later stage of the same campaign:
Boudicca, in a [chariot], with her two daughters before her, drove through the ranks. She harangued the different nations in their turn: ‘This,’ she said, ‘is not the first time that the Britons have been led to battle by a woman. But now she did not come to boast the pride of a long line of ancestry, nor even to recover her kingdom and the plundered wealth of her family. She took the field, like the meanest among them, to assert the cause of public liberty, and to seek revenge for her body seamed with ignominious stripes, and her two daughters infamously ravished. From the pride and arrogance of the Romans nothing is sacred; all are subject to violation; the old endure the scourge, and the virgins are deflowered. But the vindictive gods are now at hand. A Roman legion dared to face the warlike Britons: with their lives they paid for their rashness . . .’2
After Boudicca’s victory at Colchester the Roman general Suetonius was forced to march to London, but then decided to abandon it as indefensible. The first Londoners pleaded with Suetonius to stay, but he refused and ‘the signal for the march was given’. In consequence Boudicca’s forces sacked an unresisting London and burnt it to the ground. The city was devastated, its destruction so comprehensive that today modern archeologists find in nearly every site a layer of charred remains up to half a metre thick, on both sides of the Thames.
London was at this time the nerve centre of a new regime of state taxation and colonial land dispossession that enraged the indigenous peasantry, as testified by the Boudiccan revolt.3 The final victory, though, lay with the Romans. Legions returning from Wales defeated Boudicca at a battle in the Midlands, after which she took her own life by drinking poison. The Romans returned to London and set about rebuilding it, although serious construction would not begin for another decade. Ironically, it was another foreigner, Gaius Julius Alpinus Classicianus, a member of the Gallic aristocracy and a brilliant administrator, who began rebuilding London. It was AD 75 before the forum-basilica was begun. But at the end of the first century AD London was the largest town on the British Isles. About AD 200 the stone wall which was to mark out the city limits for the next 1,500 years was constructed, stretching from what is now the site of the Tower of London to the Fleet River, near Blackfriars. Gates were made at Bishopsgate, Newgate, and Ludgate. The existing Aldgate was incorporated into the wall.4
THE DECLINE OF LONDINIUM AND THE RISE OF LUNDENWIC
In the second century AD, London prospered and grew as an imperial and trade hub. But in the following one hundred years growth was thrown into reverse. The Roman Empire was overextended, defending long frontiers against increasingly powerful enemies. Earlier in Roman history, wars of conquest had meant inflows of treasure and slaves. Later, as the frontiers became permanent borders, like Hadrian’s Wall, the empire became dependent on internal resources. Higher taxes replaced the spoils of war, and forced labour was imposed on peasants as the supply of slaves dried up. The imperial state siphoned wealth away from towns to support the army.
In AD 200 Britannia was divided in two. One half, Britannia Inferior, was ruled from York, the other half, Britannia Superior, was ruled