Political realities in Britain interfered with Gregory’s vision. When Mellitus was eventually installed at London, it was as a bishop subordinate to the archdiocese of Canterbury. The real power in southern Britain was King Æthelberht of Kent (with the apparent acquiescence of his nephew Sæberht, king of Essex). Æthelberht was quite content for his own trading emporium at Canterbury to remain the pre-eminent centre of Roman Christianity in Britain (Augustine himself had been recognized as the first archbishop of Canterbury in 597). Nevertheless, the symbolic importance of London had been recognized, and the church of St Paul’s was duly built within the walls. No trace of the original building survives, no indication of its size or grandeur, nor even whether it was raised in stone or timber; but somewhere below the vast hulk of Wren’s cathedral, down through the remnants of the great gothic building that burned in 1666, some shattered trace of that Saxon church may yet lie.
Mellitus did not have long to enjoy his episcopal power. When Kings Æthelberht and Sæberht both died in 616–17, the former was replaced by his son Eadbald, and the latter by his own three sons: Sæward, Seaxred and Seaxbald. Unfortunately for Mellitus, all of these men were initially unenthusiastic about the whole idea of Christianity. The sons of Sæberht kicked Bishop Mellitus out of London, and King Eadbald promptly kicked him out of the country. When Eadbald eventually revised his religious opinions and allowed Mellitus to return to Kent in 618–19, the bishop discovered that Kentish royal power had found its limits. Returning to London to resume his ministry, he must have been dismayed to find that its townspeople were not at all pleased to have him back, preferring – as Bede put it – ‘their own idolatrous priests’. Faced with the ‘refusal and resistance’ of London’s defiantly pagan townsfolk (backed, we must assume, by the recalcitrant heathen princes of Essex), both Kentish king and Church of Rome were rendered powerless.7 Armed with enviable geopolitical advantages, the townsfolk did what generations of Londoners have done ever since: they slammed shut the (probably metaphorical) gates and told the bishop to bugger off.fn3
These anecdotes comprise the earliest written mentions of London in the early Middle Ages, and introduce themes that run throughout the city’s history. Poised between kingdoms – Kent and Essex, East Anglia and Mercia, Wessex and, later, the ‘Danelaw’ – early medieval London was able to routinely exploit the political tensions that ran through and focused on the city. This position at the convergence of frontiers, on the fault lines of effective authority, enabled London to grow prosperous. It could be a meeting place and a bargaining chip, a market place, a hub for intrigue, a centre of international commerce. Its liminality also fostered a sense of independence amongst the city’s populace – a belligerence and bloody-mindedness that would, over the centuries, manifest itself repeatedly in the teeth of unwelcome demands and unwanted guests. The same attributes, however, would also make the city desirable – an economic and political prize worth any amount of blood and treasure to capture or defend.
That desire for the city – the urge to possess it, to exploit it, to wield authority within and from it – had revealed itself from the beginning as an animating force. It was not, as the story of Mellitus reveals, a desire founded solely in worldly ambitions and practicalities. Of all the former imperial cities of Britannia it was Londinium that Pope Gregory had imagined should form the head of a new Christian province. It was a romantic vision, an image of the Roman Empire reborn as a great commonwealth of faith with Rome at its heart. In that vision, the old cities and provincial capitals would rise from chaos as beacons of religion, learning and orderly government – miniature reflections of the heavenly Jerusalem. This dream of restored empire, fluttering in the breasts of kings and ecclesiarchs, would keep London’s weak pulse beating throughout the darkest years of its decay – an image that would sustain it in the minds of those whose deeds would shape its destiny in the years ahead. Two centuries after Mellitus, London remained, in the words of a charter of King Coenwulf of Mercia, ‘a famous place and a royal town’.8
Yet when those words were written in 811 – and thirty-one years later, when Viking ships sailed past the walls in 842 – the ruins of Londinium had still not been reclaimed. Rotting beside the Thames for more than four centuries, the walls were the relics of a world as far removed from the Viking Age as the Renaissance is from our own. The sight of them may have been something of a novelty for people hailing from lands that had never been yoked to Rome; it might have seemed to them – as it had to the Anglo-Saxons – a ghost town, filled with the shades of fallen empires. The wilful neglect, avoidance even, of the old city of Londinium, indeed of most Roman urban settlements in Britain, is one of the great puzzles of the early Anglo-Saxon period. Some of this reluctance to make use of the old urban environment was no doubt informed by practicality – Londinium’s river wall was not very conducive to water-borne trade, and the repair and maintenance of masonry buildings required specialist skills and materials that were hard to acquire. But as a blanket explanation for a widespread phenomenon, this sort of functionalist reasoning feels unduly reductive – and not a little patronizing. Even the rudest of fantasy barbarians could surely find the wherewithal to balance stones one atop the other – or to demolish them when they got in the way.
In truth, the Anglo-Saxons possessed a deep intellectual and emotional sophistication, a clear capacity to make philosophical and aesthetic choices untethered from base economic calculation and utilitarianism. Their imaginative world was rich and complex, their poetry tightly structured yet poignant – sparsely drawn but deeply allusive. Like a bright spring bubbling from the mountain rock, the glittering stream of verse speaks of worlds unseen, of vast caverns and subterranean rivers flowing with forgotten myths and half-remembered pasts.
Well-wrought this wall-stone, weird broke it;
Bastions busted, burst is giant’s work.
Roofs are ruined, ruptured turrets,
Ring-gate broken, rime on lime-work,
Cloven shower-shields, sheered, fallen,
Age ate under them. Earth-grasp holds fast
The noble workers, decayed, departed
in earth’s hard-grip, while a hundred times
the generations pass.9
The Ruin, the Old English poem from which the lines above are translated, describes the remains of a Roman city. The poet here has turned the experience of living amongst ruins into an elegiac romanticism weighed down with fate – what the English knew as wyrd (‘weird’) and the Norse as urðr; it was a sense, shared amongst the peoples of northern Europe, that all roads led inevitably into darkness – ‘that all glory’, as Tolkien put it, ‘ends in night’.10
The environments that played host to these great turnings of the cosmic wheel were therefore not happy places, not conducive to the building of bright futures. The ruin and decay was a reminder of failure and hubris, of the striking hand of fate and the erasures of history, haunted by the workings of time and by the memories of giants. It is for these reasons, as much as for any practical purpose, that the former Roman cities of Britain were shunned. In Londinium, only the small area around St Paul’s seems to have remained in use at all, the rest of the city crumbling, filth-strewn and insect-infested. Some of the clearest evidence for a human presence has been found in the shape of two strange corpses, two women of the eighth century whose bodies were disposed of in bizarre circumstances near Bull Wharf, between the river and the walls. The first had died