Londinium declined during the third and fourth centuries, as public buildings were not repaired and the private houses of the elite were too expensive to maintain. The population shrank, and much of the townscape was reduced to dereliction and filth. A change of name – from Londinium to Augusta (meaning ‘Imperial’) – could not alter the reality: the empire and its cities were in decline as an all-powerful state centralized resources in a desperate struggle to keep the ‘barbarians’ out. It was a struggle that the Romans abandoned in relation to Britain around AD 400. London by then was little more than ruins and waste ground.5
In the early fifth century Angles and Saxons from northern Germany settled in southern Britain. To the west of the deserted Roman city were the Middle Saxons (hence Middlesex), to the east the Eastern Saxons (hence Essex). They spoke a Germanic language that they called ‘Englisc’. Urban living had collapsed, and these newcomers were mostly engaged in settled agriculture. But slowly some new large settlements did appear. Around 730 the chronicler Bede was describing the ‘metropolis of the East Saxons’ as ‘an emporium for many nations coming by land and sea’. Excavations over many years have revealed that the site Bede was referring to lay immediately west of the walled Roman city of Londinium – its core remains are now underneath Fleet Street, the Strand and Trafalgar Square. This is where the Saxon trading town was built. Contemporary documents refer to this town as Lundenwic. In Anglo-Saxon, the ‘wic’ ending meant ‘market’, or to use Bede’s Latin equivalent, ‘emporium’.
Lundenwic extended from the western edge of the Roman city round the riverbank south and west to Westminster, and as far north as Oxford Street: excavations at the Royal Opera House revealed nearly sixty buildings along one street. Lundenwic benefited from a shallow beach on the Thames. The Strand is both a synonym for beach and marks the higher tidal reach of the Thames at this time. It was a better place for ships to dock than the old decaying quays of Londinium. But Lundenwic was close enough to the old Roman centre to make use of the network of Roman roads. Pottery, glass and metalwork from northern France and the Rhineland, millstones from Germany and amber from the Baltic have all been found in Lundenwic. So too have English wool and evidence of weaving and metal working. But Lundenwic was, after more than 200 years, destined to disappear. From the end of the eighth century Viking sea raiders, Danes and Norwegians, began to attack Britain. North Sea trade was disrupted and the Vikings attacked Lundenwic in 842 and 851. In 865 the Great Army of the Danish Vikings began a campaign which subdued the kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia and most of Mercia. In 871–72 the Danish army wintered in London. By 877 only King Alfred’s West Saxons were outside Danish control.
THE RISE OF LUNDENBURG
King Alfred is perhaps best known for his lack of culinary ability. But he has a greater claim to fame as the figure who re-established London on the site of the old, deserted location within the Roman walls. Alfred’s advance to London came after his fortunes had reached their lowest ebb. After years of warfare against the Danes, Alfred was surprised at the royal stronghold of Chippenham in Wiltshire while celebrating Twelfth Night in 878. Fleeing southwest, he took refuge in the Somerset levels where, according to legend, he burnt the cakes.
Alfred rallied his forces in Wessex, defeated the Danes at the battle of Ethandun (possibly at Westbury) and besieged them until they surrendered at Chippenham. The Danish King Guthrum converted to Christianity, and the Danes left Wessex. Within a decade Alfred had become strong enough to conclude a treaty with Guthrum that divided up the old kingdom of Mercia. The boundary between Alfred’s kingdom and the Danelaw, as Guthrum’s territory was now called, ran along the Thames and up the valley of the River Lea to the east of the old Roman city.
Practically the only change within the old city since the Romans left was the establishment of a church called St Paul’s on Ludgate Hill, built in 604 by Mellitus, bishop of the East Saxons. This wooden building burned down in 675 and was rebuilt ten years later. Alfred needed London as a border fortress: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun on Alfred’s instructions and maintained until the middle of the twelfth century, records his decision to rebuild the city in 886: ‘King Alfred fortified the city of London [gesette Lunden burg, in the original]’. The city was then given into the control of Alderman Ethelred, ‘to hold it under him’.6
Under Ethelred, Lundenburg (or Lundenburh) was rebuilt east of St Paul’s with new blocks of streets on a grid system. A new dock was built called Ethelred’s Hithe (now Queenshithe). The Saxon town of Lundenwic became fields once more, remembered in the name Aldwych, the ‘old town’. South of the river, where graveyards had earlier replaced the Roman urban area, development took place: Southwark is first mentioned around 915 as Suthringa geweorche, the fortified work of the men of Surrey. Indeed fortification north and south of the Thames was still very necessary, as conflict with the Danes, never long subdued, erupted once more.
Alfred died around 900. However, it took another 116 years before the power of the Danes in England was such that a Danish King, Cnut, became accepted as King of all the English. Londoners had already reached a separate peace with Cnut, and had bought off invaders during the preceding wars by the payment of Danegeld. This continued as a regular levy, and in 1018 London was taxed 10,500 pounds in silver: one eighth of the total burden placed upon the nation, an indicator that London was again the wealthiest and largest town in the country. And although the abbey had existed since the eighth century, it was under Cnut that Westminster began to develop on what was then Thorney Island in the Thames, at the western tip of Lundenwic. Cnut was possibly the first monarch to reside at Westminster and it is here, tradition has it, that he ironically demonstrated the limits of royal power by commanding the incoming tidal wash of the Thames to retreat.
Perhaps if Cnut or his successors Harold Harefoot and Harthacnut had lived longer, his reign might have marked out a very different path for Britain’s history, in joint sovereignty with Scandinavian countries. ‘Anglo-Saxon freedom’ was not all myth. ‘Freemen’ had obligations of military service, but also the rights of security of property and protection under the law. The Domesday Book accordingly distinguishes between serfs and freemen. But Cnut’s heirs died early and the survivor of the Wessex dynasty, Edward the Confessor, was recalled from exile in Normandy to take the throne in 1043.
From then on, Norman nobles took an increasing interest in England. When Edward died in 1066 the Witan, a group of about sixty lords and bishops, met to decide who would become the next king of England. They chose Harold, the son of Earl Godwin of Wessex, over William of Normandy, to whom Harold had previously promised the throne. The Norman invasion and the Battle of Hastings reversed that decision.
So began the Norman conquest of London, the last hostile foreign invasion the capital has endured to date. Centuries later, in the English Revolution, Levellers would complain that ‘the Norman Yoke’ had robbed ‘free-born Englishmen’ of their rights. Perhaps they were inventing less, and remembering more, than modern historians have been willing to allow.
2
Lords, Lollards, Heretics and Peasants in Revolt
I am the saviour of the poor.
William Longbeard
THE ‘COMMUNE’ OF LONDON
Westminster Abbey was consecrated in 1065, but the first monarch to be crowned there did not last twelve months. Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, lost his life the following year at the Battle of Hastings. Despite his victory, William of Normandy knew that he couldn’t control England without occupying London. As the twelfth-century Song of the Battle of Hastings had it: ‘London is a great city, overflowing with forward inhabitants and richer in treasure than the rest of the kingdom. Protected on the left side by its walls, on the right side by the river, it neither fears its enemies nor dreads being taken by storm.’ And indeed William could not conquer London by storm. An assault on London Bridge failed,