London

By this time nothing remained of the old houses but their walls, and these, disintegrated by frost and rain, were mostly ready to fall; the gardens of the villas, the beautiful gardens in which their owners took so much delight, were choked and overgrown with nettles and brambles; the mosaic pavements were covered up with rubbish and mould.

How long did this go on? For fifty years or more. The rude survivors of Augusta and their children lived neglected and forgotten, like the Arabs in the ruins of Palmyra. Outside they knew that a fierce enemy roamed the country; sometimes they could see a band of them on the southern bank gazing curiously at the silent and deserted walls of the City. But these warriors cared nothing for cities, and shuddered, suspecting magic at the sight of the gray wall, and went away again.

One day, however, because nothing remains always undiscovered, there came along the great Vicinal Way so tough and strong, on which the tooth of Time gnawed in vain, a troop of East Saxons. They were an offshoot, a late arrival, a small colony looking about if haply they could find or conquer a convenient place of settlement not yet held by their own people. They marched along the road, and presently saw before them the gray walls of the City, with its gates and bastions. It was a city of which they had heard – once full of people, now, like so many others, a waste chester. It was of no use to them; they wanted a place convenient for farming, not a place encumbered with ruins of houses; a place where they could set up their village community and grow their crops and keep their cattle. The first rush and fury of battle were now over. The East Saxons were at peace, the enemy being either driven away or killed. A single generation of comfort and prosperity had made the people milder in temper. They desired no longer to fight and slay. What, however, if they were to visit the City?

The gate was closed. They blew their horns and called upon the people, if there were any, to surrender. There was no answer. No arrow was shot from the walls, not a stone was thrown, not a head was seen upon the bastion. Then they plied their axes upon the crumbling wood until the gate gave way and fell backward with a crash. Shouting, the men of Essex ran forward. But they soon ceased to shout. Within they found a deserted city; the walls of what had been stately villas stood in broad gardens, but the houses were roofless, the pictured pavements were broken or covered up, the fountains were choked, the walls were tottering. The astonished warriors pressed forward. The ruined villas gave way to crumbling remains of smaller houses standing close together. The streets showed signs of traffic in deep ruts worn by the cart-wheels. Grass grew between the stones. Here and there stood buildings larger than the houses; they, too, were roofless, but over the lintels were carved certain curious emblems – crosses and palm-branches, lambs, vine leaves, and even fish – the meaning of which they understood not. Then the men reached the river-side. Here there had also been a wall, but much of it was broken down; and here they found certain circular huts thatched. Within, the fire was still burning in the middle of the hut. There were signs of hurried departure – the fish was still in the frying-pan, the bed of dried leaves still warm. Where were the people?

They were gone. They had fled in affright. When they heard the shouts of the Saxons, they gathered together their weapons and such things as they could carry, and they fled. They passed out by the gate of that road which their conquerors afterwards called Watling Street. Outside the City they turned northward, and plunged for safety into the pathless forest, whither the enemy would not follow.

When these Saxons found that the walled area contained nothing that was of the least use to them they simply went away. They left it quite alone, as they left the places which they called Pevensey, Silchester, Porchester, and Richborough, and as they left many other waste chesters.

Then Augusta lay silent and dead for a space.

Presently the fugitives crept back and resumed their old life among the ruins and died peacefully, and were followed by their children.

How, then, did London get settled again?

The times became peaceful: the tide of warfare rolled westward; there were no more ships crossing with fresh invaders; there were no more pirates hovering about the broad reaches of the Lower Thames. The country round London on all sides – north, south, east, and west – was settled and in tranquillity. The river was safe. Then a few merchants, finding that the way was open, timidly ventured up the river with wares such as might tempt those fair-haired savages. They went to the port of which the memory survived. No one disputed with them the possession of the grass-grown quays; there were no people, there was no market, there were no buyers. They then sent messengers to the nearest settlements; these – the first commercial travellers, the first gentlemen of the road – showed spear-heads of the finest, swords of the stoutest, beautiful helmets and fine shields, all to be had in exchange for wool and hides. The people learned to trade, and London began to revive. The rustics saw things that tempted them; new wants, new desires were created in their minds. Some of them went into the town and admired its life, how busy it was, how full of companionship; and they thought with pity of the quiet country life and the long days all alone in the fields; they desired to stay there; others saw the beauty of the arts, and were attracted by natural aptitude to learn and practise them. Others, quicker witted than the rest, perceived how by trade a man may live without his own handiwork and by the labor of his brother man. No discovery ever was made more important to the world than this great fact. "You, my brother," said this discoverer, "shall continue to dig and to toil, in hot weather or cold; your limbs shall stiffen and your back shall be bent; I, for my part, will take your work and sell it in places where it is wanted. My shoulders will not grow round, nor will my back be bent. On the contrary, I shall walk jocund and erect, with a laughing eye and a dancing leg, when you are long past laugh or saraband. It is an excellent division of labor. To me the market, where I shall sit at ease chaffering with my wares and jesting with my fellows and feasting at night. To you the plough and the sickle and the flail. An excellent division."

Then more merchants came, and yet more merchants, and the people began to flock in from the country as they do now; and London – Augusta being dead – set her children to work, making some rich, for an example and a stimulus – else no one would work – and keeping the many poor – else there would be no chance for the few to get rich. And she has kept them at work ever since. So that it came to pass when Bishop Mellitus, first of the bishops of London, came to his diocese in the year 604, he found it once more a market and a port with a goodly trade and a crowd of ships and a new people, proud, turbulent, and independent.

So began and so grew modern London.

To the old Rome it owes nothing, not so much as a tradition. Later, when another kind of influence began, London learned much and took much from Rome; but from Augusta – from Roman London – nothing. Roman traditions, Roman speech, Roman superstitions linger yet among the southern Spaniards, though the Moor conquered and held the country for six hundred years. They linger, in spite of many conquests, in France, in Italy (north and south), in Roumania, in Anatolia. In London alone, of all the places which Imperial Rome made her own, and kept for hundreds of years, no trace of ancient Rome remains. When London next hears of the Eternal City it is Rome of the Christian Church.

Compare the conquest of London by the men of Essex with that of Jerusalem by Titus. The latter conqueror utterly destroyed the city, and drove out its people. One might have expected the silence of Silchester or Pevensey. No, the people crept back by degrees; the old traditions remained and still remain. Behind the monkish sites are those familiar to the common people. Here is the old place of execution – the monks knew nothing of that – here is the valley of Hinnom; here that of Kedron. These memories have not died. But of the old Augusta nothing at all remains. Not a single tradition was preserved by the scanty remnant of slaves which survived the conquest; not a single name survives. All the streets have been renamed – nay, their very course has been changed. The literature of the City, which, like Bordeaux, had its poets and its schools of rhetoric, has disappeared; it has vanished as completely as that of Carthage. All the memories of four hundred years have gone; there is nothing left but a few fragments of the old wall, and these seem to contain but little of the Roman work: an old bath, part of the course of an ancient street, and the fragment which we call London Stone. Perhaps some portions of the Roman river-wall have been unearthed, but this is uncertain.

One fact alone has been considered to suggest that some of the old Roman buildings remained and were used again for their old purposes.

In the oldest part of the City, that which lies along the river-bank, the churches are mostly dedicated to the apostles. Those which stand farther inland are dedicated to local and later saints – St. Dunstan, St. Botolph, St. Osyth, St. Ethelburga, for instance. But among those along the river are the churches of St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary, St. Stephen, St. Michael. It is therefore suggested, but with hesitation, that when the East Saxons took possession they found the Roman basilicas still standing; that when they became converted they learned the original purpose of their churches and the meaning of the emblems; that they proceeded to rebuild them, preserving their dedications, and made them their own churches. This may be so, but I do not think it at all likely. It is possible, I say, but not probable.

You have heard the story how Augusta disappeared, and how the East Saxons found it deserted, and how London was born, not the daughter of Augusta at all. Augusta was childless.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER I

The principal Roman buildings consisted of a bridge, a wall, a fort at either end of this bridge, and two ports – Queenhithe and Billingsgate. No one knows when the bridge was built: the wall was not erected until some time between A.D. 350 and A.D. 369. At that time the area enclosed by the wall was covered with villas and gardens. The wall has been traced with certainty, and portions either of the original wall or the mediæval repairs have been found in many places, and may still be seen above-ground. The Roman remains which have been dug up consist of mosaic pavements, sepulchral cists, keys, toilet articles, lamps, fibulæ, amphoræ, domestic things, and a few bronze statuettes. Nothing whatever has been found to show that Augusta was ever a great city, in the sense that Massilia, Ephesus, Bordeaux, or Alexandria was great.

II

SAXON AND NORMAN

The citizens of New London – Augusta having thus perished – were from the outset a people of mixed race. But the Saxons, and especially the East Saxons, prevailed. Strangely, it is Essex which has always prevailed in London. The modern Cockney dialect, which says "laidy" and "baiby" for lady and baby, and "whoy" and "hoigh" for why and high, is pure Essex: you can hear it spoken all over the country districts of that little-visited county: it is a dialect so strong that it destroys all other fashions of speech, even the burr of Cumberland and the broad drawl of Devonshire. Saxon London was mainly East Saxon. But, besides the new owners of London, there was, first of all, some remnant of the scattered Welsh. I do not mean the miserable survivors of Augustan London, found in the place when it was first entered, but those Britons who had taken refuge in the forests of Surrey, Sussex, and Middlesex, and there lived as they could, until they could safely venture forth among their conquerors. Gildas, as we have seen, speaks of these people; and their skulls remain in the Saxon cemeteries to prove how great a Celtic element survived among the English conquerors. Next, there were the foreign merchants. This class formed a considerable proportion of the better class; and it grew larger every day, because the East Saxon was certainly not so sharp in affairs as the "man of Rouen;" nor was he in business capacity equal to the Fleming and the German. But as happens, mutatis mutandis, at the present day, those who were Flemings and the men of Rouen, speaking their own language, under Ethelred, had all become Londoners, speaking the English tongue, under Henry Beauclerk.

It was, indeed, a complete revolution in his manners and customs for the East Saxon when he exchanged his village community for a walled town. Consider: at first he lived retired in the country, farming and cattle-breeding, banded with other families for safety; he kept up the customs of his fatherland, he carried on no trade, he suffered the old towns to fall into ruin; his kinglet had no capital, but roamed about from place to place, administering justice in the royal wagon; he enjoyed a ferocious and blood-thirsty religion suiting his savage disposition; he knew only the simplest arts; he could till the ground, grind his corn, brew beer and mead, and work a little in metals; his women could spin; he knew no letters; he looked for nothing better than ever-recurring war, with intervals of peace and feasting; to die on a battle-field was an enviable lot, because it carried him away to everlasting happiness. Look at the same man four hundred years later. He is now a Christian; he is, in a way, a scholar; he is an architect, an artist, an illuminator, a musician, a law-maker, a diplomatist, an artificer, a caster of bells, a worker in gold and silver; he carries on fisheries; he is a merchant; he builds ships; he founds trade-guilds – he is as far removed from the fierce warrior who leaped ashore at Thanet as the Romano-Briton whom he conquered was removed from the naked savage who opposed the arms of Cæsar.

The difference is chiefly due to his conversion. This has brought him under the influence of Rome Ecclesiastic. It has educated him, turned him into a townsman, and made growth possible for him. No growth is possible for any race until it first accepts the creed of civilization.

London was converted in A.D. 604. This was a hasty and incomplete conversion, executed to order; for the citizens speedily relapsed. Then they were again converted, and in sober earnest put away their old gods, keeping only a few of the more favorite superstitions; some of these remain still with us. They were so thoroughly converted that the city of London become a veritable mother of saints. There was the venerable Erkenwald, saint and bishop, he who built Bishopsgate on the site of the old Roman gate. There was St. Ethelburga, the wife of Sebert, the first Christian king; her church still stands, though not the earliest building, close beside the site of the old gate. There was St. Osyth, queen and martyr, the mother of King Offa; her name also survives in Size, or St. Osyth's, Lane, but the Church of St. Osyth was rededicated to St. Ben'et Sherehog (Benedict Skin-the-Pig); you may see the little old church-yard still, black and grimy, surrounded on three sides by tall houses. English piety loved to dedicate churches to English saints – more likely these than Italian or French – to look after the national interests. Thus there were in London churches dedicated to St. Dunstan, St. Swithin, St. Botolph (whose affection for the citizens was so well known that it was recognized by four churches), St. Edmund the Martyr, and, later on, when the Danes got their turn, churches to St. Olaf and St. Magnus.

The Englishman, thus converted, was received into the company of civilized nations. Scholars came across the Channel to teach him Latin, monks came to teach him the life of self-sacrifice, obedience, submission, and abstinence. The monastery reared its humble walls everywhere; the first foundation of the first bishop of London was a monastery. In times of war between the kinglets – when were there no wars? – the monasteries, after the whole country had been converted, were spared. Therefore the people settled around them, and enjoyed their protection. The monastery towns grew rapidly and prospered. New arts were introduced and taught by the monks, new ideas sprang up among the people, new wants were created. Moreover, intercourse began with other nations – the ecclesiastic who journeyed to Rome took with him a goodly troop of priests, monks, and laymen; they saw strange lands and observed strange customs. Some of them learned foreign languages, and even made friendships with the men who spoke them, discovering that a man who speaks another tongue is not necessarily an enemy. The Englishman was changed; yet he remained still, as he always does, whether he creates a new empire in America, or one in Australia, always an Englishman.

Meantime the kinglets made war with each other, and London became a prize for each in turn. It passed from the East Saxon to the Northumbrian, to the Mercian, to the West Saxon, as the hegemony passed from one to the other. Each kinglet learned more and more to recognize its importance and its value. One of the oldest civic documents extant is a grant of King Ethelbald to the Bishop of Rochester. He gives him the right of passing one ship of his own, or of another's, free of toll into the port of London. The toll of incoming and outgoing vessels formed, therefore, part of the royal revenue.

The history of London between A.D. 600 and the Norman Conquest is the history of England. How the City fell into the hands of the Danes, how it was finally secured by Alfred, how the Danes again obtained the City without fighting, and how the Norman was received in peace, belong to history. All this time London was steadily growing. Whatever king sat on the throne, her trade increased, and her wealth.

The buildings, till long after the Norman Conquest, were small and mean: the better houses were timber frames, with shutters or lattices, but no glass for the windows; the poorer houses were of wattle and daub. The churches were numerous and small. Some of them were still of wood, though a few were built of stone, with the simple circular arch. The first church of St. Paul's was destroyed by fire, a fate which awaited the second and the third. By the time of Edward the Confessor the second church was completed; but of this church we have no record whatever. The Saxon period, as concerns London, is the darkest of any. You may see at the Guildhall nearly everything that remains of Roman London. But there is nothing, absolutely not one single stone, to illustrate Saxon London. The city which grew up over the deserted Augusta and flourished for four hundred years has entirely disappeared. Nothing is left of it at all. The chief destroyer of Saxon London was the great fire of 1135, which swept London from end to end as effectually as that of 1666. Had it not been for these two fires, we should very likely have still standing one or two of the sturdy little Saxon churches of which the country yet affords one surviving example. Yet London is not alone in having no monuments of this period. If we take any other town, what remains in it of the years A.D. 600-1000? What is left in Rome to mark the reigns of the eighty Popes who fill that period? What in Paris to illustrate the rule of the Carlovingians? Fire and the piety of successive generations have destroyed all the buildings.

For outside show the city of Edward the Confessor and that of the second Henry were very nearly the same, and so may be treated together. The churches burned down in 1135 were rebuilt in stone, but the houses presented much the same appearance. Now, everybody who speaks of Norman London must needs speak of William Fitz Stephen. He is our only authority; all that we can do is to make commentaries and guesses based on the text of Fitz Stephen.

He was a clerk in the service of Thomas à Becket; he was present at the archbishop's murder; he wrote a Life of the saint, to which he prefixed, by happy inspiration, a brief eulogy of the City of London. It is far too brief, but it contains facts of the most priceless importance. London, we learn, possessed, besides its great cathedral, thirteen large conventual churches and one hundred and twenty-six parish churches. The White Tower was already built on the east side; the walls of the City, now kept in good repair, encircled it on all sides except the river; here the wall which had formerly defended the river front had been taken down to make way for warehouses and quays; the Royal Palace stood without the City, but connected with it by a populous suburb. Those who lived "in the suburbs" – that is, about Chancery Lane and Holborn – had spacious and beautiful gardens; there were also on this side pasture and meadow lands, with streams and water-mills; beyond the pastures was a great forest filled with wild creatures; many springs of water rose on the north side. The City was so populous that of those who went out to a muster, 20,000 were chosen as horsemen and 60,000 for the foot. We will discuss the question of population later on. Meantime one may remark that a force of 80,000 always ready to be called out means a population of 320,000 at least, which is indeed absurd, especially when we consider that the population of London, as shown by the poll-tax of Richard II., was only about 40,000.

There were three principal schools, but sometimes other schools were opened "by favor and permission." We are not told what schools these were; but there was always a school of some kind attached to every monastery and nunnery. The boys were taught Latin verse, grammar, and rhetoric; they disputed with each other in the churches on feast-days, especially about the "principles of grammar, and the rules of the past and future tenses" – truly, an agreeable pastime.

The different trades of the City were allotted their own places of work and sale. Fitz Stephen does not name the various quarters, but they can be easily ascertained from Stow, though the place assigned to each was sometimes changed. Thus, the chief market and trading-place of the City was always Cheap, a broad, open place with booths and sheds for the exposure of wares, on the north and south. The names of the streets leading out of Cheap indicate the trades that were carried on in them. The streets called Wood, Milk, Iron, Honey, Poultry, mark the site of certain markets on the north. Those named after Bread, Candles, Soap, Fish, Money-changing, are shown on the south. Along the rivers were breweries, of which one remains to this day; artificers of various kinds were gathered together in their own streets about the town. This custom of congregation was useful in more ways than one: it gave dignity to the craft and inspired self-respect for the craftsmen, it kept up the standard of good work, it made craftsmen regard each other as brethren, not as enemies; it gave them guilds, of which our trades-unions, which think of nothing but wages, are the degenerate successors; and it brought each trade under the salutary rule of the Church.

There was then – there has always been – a great plenty of food in the city of London; on the river-bank, among the vintners, there were eating-houses where at all times of the day and every day there were cooked and sold meat and fish and every kind of food. Once a week, on Friday, there was a horse-fair in Smithfield without the walls; at this fair there were races every week.

The young men of the City were greatly addicted to sports of all kinds: they skated in winter, they tilted on the water and on land, they fought, wrestled, practised archery, danced, and sang. They were a turbulent, courageous, free and independent youth, proud of their city and its wealth, proud of their power and their freedom, proud of the trade which came to their quays from every part of the world. What says Fitz Stephen?

"Aurum mittit Arabs: species et thura Sabæus:Arma Scythes: oleum palmarum divite sylvaPingue solum Babylon: Nilus lapides pretiosos:Norwegi, Russi, varium grisum, sabelinas:Seres, purpureas vestes: Galli, sua vina."

The good cleric is a little mixed in his geography. The Arabs certainly had no gold to send; the Sabæans were, however, Arabs of Saba, in Arabia Felix: they sent myrrh and frankincense; spices came from another country. Why does he assign arms to the Scythians? Egypt had turquoise mines, but no other precious stones. The purple garments of the Seres, or Chinaman, are silks. Norway and Russia still send sables and other furs, and France, happily, still sends claret.