Viking London

The place that the Vikings had come to pillage in 842 was not the walled Roman city but a new town that had sprung up to the west. Known to the locals as ‘Lundenwic’, it was an Anglo-Saxon market place of timber homes, workshops and jetties, sprawling along the shoreline of the Thames from what is now the eastern edge of Trafalgar Square to somewhere in the region of St Clement Danes (near Aldwych). It was one of a number of contemporary settlements – including Hamwic (Southampton), Gipeswic (Ipswich) and Eoforwic (York) – that were focused on servicing trade and manufactured goods (the word wic is derived from the Latin vicus, a settlement that lacked some of the essentials for a true town in the Roman sense). Lundenwic had grown up in the late seventh century to exploit the opportunities afforded by the river and its easy access to the broader waterways of the Channel and beyond, as well as the overland routes and access to the British interior that the Romans had recognized long ago in situating their own city. Lundenwic – to borrow once more from Tolkien – was Lake Town to Londinium’s Dale: a wooden market town erected in the long shadow of its shattered stone forebear, awed by the splendour of its predecessor’s memory but haunted by its doom.

There are no maps of Lundenwic. There are, in fact, no maps of London at all before the sixteenth century. What we understand of the Anglo-Saxon street plan can only be pieced together from fragmentary mentions of roads and boundaries, from the road-names and the street plan of later periods, and from archaeology. The settlement occupied an area between two Roman roads that ran from east to west – one at the southern edge of the settlement and the other a few hundred yards north of it. They were already centuries old by the time of King Offa (r.757–96). The northern route is still followed by the line of what is now Oxford Street and High Holborn. Originally the Roman road to Silchester, this was a major highway connecting London to the wider countryside and onwards to the kingdom of Wessex. At what is now Marble Arch, this road crossed the Tyburn Brook and met the junction with Watling Street. From Essex in the east all the way to the west Midlands, Watling Street took travellers from Lundenwic to the heart of Offa’s Mercia. In the tenth century it was still recognized as a national artery of major military significance – a charter of King Edgar (r.959–75), dated to the beginning of his reign, described it as the wide here stræt (‘wide army street’).11

For at least a thousand years, the place we now call Marble Arch – the crossing of Watling Street, the Silchester Road and the Tyburn Brook – has been a potent landmark, a place of communal memory that thrums with ghosts, rough justice and legal assembly. The name of the stream has become synonymous with public hangings: the last execution to take place there (of the highwayman John Austin) was carried out on 3 November 1783. From the Tudor period onward, the gallows was a triple-beamed structure, like a massive wooden version of those odd plastic bits of miniaturized garden furniture one finds in takeaway pizza boxes. Now a strange memorial to the ‘Tyburn Tree’ stands on a traffic island at the junction of Edgware Road and Bayswater Road: three young oak trees, one for each leg of that morbid timber tripod. As these trees grow, their branches will intertwine, tangling with each other into a weird simulacrum of the awful structure that once loomed in their place; roots feeding on tarmac-sealed death, limbs creaking with swinging ghosts.

For the Anglo-Saxons, the crossroads was the location of the Ossulstone (Oswulf’s Stone). This was a mysterious monolith that served as the meeting place of Ossulstone hundred, a regional division of the county of Middlesex that – though it excluded Southwark and the city within the Roman walls – included much of modern London and all of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lundenwic. It marked a place under the open sky for the freemen of the hundred to hear the king’s laws and pronouncements, to discuss and dispute with their peers, to settle grievances and see justice done. In cases of serious wrongdoing, guilt was often determined by the number (and the status) of the ‘oath-helpers’ who would swear to the innocence of the accused. Whilst penalties were not always extreme (most cases were settled by the payment of fines that related to the status of the injured party), the most serious and recalcitrant offenders could pay a high price. Hanging and beheading were the most common means of capital punishment, but burning, drowning and stoning – as well as a range of unpleasant mutilations – were also handed down to the unfortunate.

Today the area is dominated by a different monument, the funereal arch of white marble that was moved to the entrance of Hyde Park in 1851. This great rude hunk of architectural salvage from aborted plans for Buckingham Palace stands self-consciously adrift on its traffic island – unsure of its purpose, unmoored from its surroundings, a baroque obsolescence washed up on the flagstone beaches of the mystifying archipelago that (after the arcane traffic schemes of the 1960s) now lies along the chaotic littoral of London’s West End. Of the original stone monument – Oswulf’s Stone – there is no longer any trace.fn4

For the people of Lundenwic, however, it was the southern road that held the greater everyday importance during the eighth and early ninth centuries. Connecting the Roman walled city (and the church of St Paul’s) with an area of timber-built settlement encompassing what is now Covent Garden and the surrounding environs, the road ran just to the north of the sloping Thames foreshore, overlooking and providing access to the water. Before the twelfth century it was known formally as Akeman Street (Akemannestraet), from the Old English name for Bath (Acemannesceastre), the Roman city where the road terminated its straight-line drive through the western shires of England.13 But to the people of Lundenwic, just as to modern Londoners, their local stretch of this great road was almost certainly known by association with the shoreline that it shadowed: the Strand, a word unchanged in sound, form or meaning from the Old English (strand: ‘shoreline’, ‘beach’, ‘bank’).14

Craven Passage is one of the many crannies that riddle the city behind the grand façades, the modern steel and concrete. These are the mouseholes of history, the places where forgotten vistas and lost walks cling on in the shadows, pattering footsteps and muttered voices caught when the traffic dies away, when the light dims – a stone tape-recording. The Passage, the dingy underbelly of Charing Cross station, is a brick and flagstone vault that bores beneath the platforms of the Victorian station. At its eastern end in the subterranean half-light is the point of egress to Heaven nightclub on Villiers Street, one of the most famous of London’s gay clubs. It was just to the south of this dank underpass – part alleyway, part catacomb – that evidence of the Anglo-Saxon embankment was discovered in 1987: to walk the passage from Northumberland Avenue to Villiers Street is to promenade on the edge of Lundenwic’s waterfront, to jostle with sailors and dock-hands, barrels and slaves. At its western end the passageway emerges into daylight, splitting The Ship & Shovell into two – the only London pub that occupies both sides of a thoroughfare. Just beyond the pub, the passage crosses Craven Street where, left towards where the water once lapped against the Anglo-Saxon boardwalk, Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, lived for two months in 1849 at lodgings in number 25 – a handsome end-of-terrace Georgian house that still stands.

The writing of Moby-Dick probably began almost at the moment that Melville left London; his journal indicates that he had little enough time for writing amidst visits to the British Museum (‘big arm & foot­–Rosetta stone–Ninevah sculptures–&c’), antiquarian shopping trips (‘Looked over a lot of ancient maps of London. Bought one (A.D. 1766) for 3 & 6 pence’), meetings with publishers and bouts of general indulgence (‘Porter passed round in tankards. Round table, potatoes in a napkin. Afterwards, Gin, brandy, whiskey & cigars’) – all in all, a fine summation of a writer’s ideal life in London. Ideas for the novel, however, were undoubtedly congealing during his stay in the city.15 ‘It is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk,’ wrote Melville in 1851 of his masterpiece, ‘but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.’16fn5 It would no doubt have pleased him, thrilled him maybe, to have known that his lodgings were perched above the Anglo-Saxon waterline, where briny-arsed northern sailors once roamed.

The waterfront was further north than it is today, free from the brick and concrete accretions of later centuries that have squeezed the river into an ever-narrowing channel. But even in the eighth century the river’s edge was being adapted to human purposes. Fragments of the Anglo-Saxon waterfront have been found near Charing Cross station and Buckingham Street, running from 18–20 York Buildings towards Somerset House, skirting the north edge of Victoria Embankment Gardens. Here the foreshore was embanked with wooden and wattle revetments, creating an artificial timber floor which boats could be brought alongside and goods unloaded on to, and where much of the trade and barter probably took place. This timbered shoreline was the true heart of Lundenwic, a pulsing valve through which people, goods and silver passed back and forth along the water.

Between the Strand and Oxford Street, the other main roads of Lundenwic seem largely to have served as access to and from the waterfront. For the most part these are known from short fragmentary stretches of gravel highway that have been uncovered archaeologically or are inferred from the orientation of buildings. Drury Lane and St Martin’s Lane both seem to have been originally laid out in the seventh century as Lundenwic developed, and another north–south route probably ran from Charing Cross to Westminster, and north towards Oxford Street (the Silchester Road). The lines of these roads probably corresponded fairly closely to their modern counterparts, and can be traced in the earliest Tudor maps.

Elsewhere, excavations have produced evidence of narrow gravel lanes, running towards and parallel with the river, lined by rectilinear buildings and ditches laid out in a way that implies a regular street plan: little streets at right angles to each other, the dwellings and workshops of the townspeople set out in tidy rows. At the site of the Royal Opera House, at Maiden Lane and Exeter Street, at 36 King Street and 28–30 James Street and tucked at the north-eastern corner of Covent Garden square itself, the paths and holloways of the Anglo-Saxon settlement carved and crossed, etched into the clay by the footfall of people and beasts, the passage of carts and goods, the flow of games and fights and dancing. Passers-by would have drifted across the fronts of rectangular timber houses, many (though not all) with their gable-ends flush to the roadside, doors opening into rutted filth and stagnant water, mud, gravel and dung. Others were accessed from the long side, from narrow footpaths through yards that stank with refuse and the shit of cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and humans. There were gardens and animals, fences and outhouses, workshops and fruit trees and forges – a humming community of men, women, children and creatures.

Around a hundred buildings have been discovered in Lundenwic, not all of them active at the same time (many were built on top of the remains of others, making the job of archaeologists harder than it would otherwise be, obscuring and confusing the sequence of habitation at particular locations). The average size of a dwelling or workshop was approximately forty feet long and eighteen feet wide – not palatial by any means, although a cash buyer for that sort of square footage in Covent Garden today would have to be a multi-millionaire. Buildings were timber-framed and single-storey, with walls of wattle and daub and roofs of thatch or oaken shingles; they were heated by rectangular floor-hearths or round ovens, and lit by ceramic oil-lamps and candles. Doors swung on iron hinges and were secured with iron bolts. It was in these buildings – whether homes or workshops or both – that the craftsmen and women of Lundenwic worked.

One of the things that seems to have attracted foreign traders to Lundenwic (and other English wics) was worked textile: cloth – both linen and wool – was not merely exchanged at London’s market, but was also made there. The evidence can be found across Lundenwic. Finds of spindle whorls and loom weights in considerable numbers imply a substantial output, a craft industry that supplied textiles to serve personal needs and domestic markets as well as to meet a demand for high-quality exports. Particular concentrations of evidence for weaving have been found at two sites that lie on the line of Drury Lane (55–57 Drury Lane and Bruce House at 1 Kemble Street), and at a location in Covent Garden on the edge of Lundenwic, bounded by Shorts Garden, Earlham Street and Neal Street – a stone’s throw from Seven Dials.

That Anglo-Saxon cloth was prized on the continent is confirmed by the contents of an extraordinary letter of 796 from Charlemagne (at that time king of the Franks and the Lombards) to King Offa. Evidently, Offa had grumbled about the size of imported quern-stones – used primarily for grinding cereals – as well as some issues concerning the treatment of merchants. Charlemagne responds:

Now about those black quern-stones you wanted; you had better send a guy over here to tell us what sort of thing you want; then we can sort that out for you and help with the transport. But since you’ve got into this size issue, I’ve got to tell you that my guys have a thing or two to say about those short cloaks you’ve been sending us. You’re going to have to get your people to make up some cloaks like they used to, bro; you know – like the ones we used to get back in the day … fn6

Anglo-Saxon cloaks were evidently in demand by the Frankish great and good – the longer, apparently, the better.

It wasn’t only weaving that drove the industry of Lundenwic – numerous other crafts were practised in the buildings that once lay between the River Fleet and Tyburn. Antler and bone were turned into combs in workshops where the Royal Opera House extension now stands, quiet work that would have been disturbed by the skriking of hammers from the smithies nearby. Glass was worked and leather was punched, wood was shaped and animals were butchered. What the inhabitants could not produce was brought in from further afield – animal produce from farms outside the settlement, fish caught downriver in the estuary, wine brought from overseas, figs from the Mediterranean, quern-stones from the Rhineland.

All the evidence suggests that Lundenwic in the eighth century was a lively, prosperous place where people lived in relative comfort. They ate bacon and drank ale, munched on apples and warmed their heels by flaming hearths in winter. They crafted day-to-day objects, wove cloth and farmed produce, and presumably took good money and – more often – goods in exchange from the foreign traders who trod the timber embankments beside the Strand. It was a place stocked with humans, young and hale, and animals good for work and food and riding; a place that might well have presented an attractive target to the ruthless and the bold.

Although most of the sailors whose boats arrived at the Strand from overseas would have been Franks or Frisians, it is very likely that Scandinavians were also regular visitors to Lundenwic’s markets. Familiarity may well have spurred the raids on Lundenwic and other North Sea emporia – the Vikings already knew of the wealth to be found in such places, and if they hadn’t been there themselves, they had heard about it from others – from friends and kinsmen, from Frisian traders, from chattering monks bound for slavery. Some, perhaps, hawking their wares on the Strand and filling their shallow-keeled ships with good Lundenwic cloth, had made cold calculation even as they bartered: of profits to be made from ships filled with stolen silver, of slaves taken at the sword’s edge – the risk of death weighed against the reward of plunder.

If they did, and if the raid of 842 was truly the first of its kind, then they had left it very late to roll the die. By the mid-ninth century, Lundenwic was a shadow of what it had been in the eighth century. Occupation seems to have come to an end in many parts of the settlement, and while activity continued it was no longer as coherent or as wealthy as it had been; it was fragmented, knots of buildings and associated smallholdings scattered over the site of Lundenwic, separated by wasteland and punctuated with rubbish pits. Serious fires had taken a toll – in 764, 798 and 801 – but there should be little doubt that Viking raids were largely responsible for the severe economic malaise that settled in the first half of the ninth century. This is not to say that Lundenwic was no longer important. It was clearly important enough to call down the Viking raid of 842, and a hoard of 250 coins buried around the same time (and possibly related to the Viking threat) stands testament to the wealth that still flowed through the settlement.fn7 Substantial ninth-century ditches, dug at Maiden Lane and the Royal Opera House, bear witness to both a heightened sense of danger and to the continued presence of something in the region of Covent Garden that was worth labouring to protect. Nevertheless, a lack of security depresses economic growth and investment – as true then as it is now – and the risk to places accessible by water was only growing stronger.

In 851 another Viking fleet entered the Thames. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 350 ships slid into the estuary, sacking Canterbury before moving on to London. There are no surviving Viking ships that date to the mid-ninth century. The closest parallel to the vessels that attacked London in 851 is a ship recovered from a burial mound at Gokstad near Oslo in Norway. Constructed in the 890s, the Gokstad ship is a beautiful object, a masterpiece of technology and design. The strakes of its clinker-built hull taper with the smooth curves of living trees up to the razor-edged prow: a sleek and deadly serpent of the waves. Broad enough in the belly for a substantial crew and cargo, but still fast and lethal under sail and oar, the Gokstad ship could have carried around thirty-five rowers, all of whom would probably have been expected to fight. If ships of the fleet that entered the Thames in 851 were of similar size, and if the numbers provided by the Chronicle are accurate, this Viking warband could have fielded up to 12,250 warriors.

This is a large number by any measure, and the reported size of Viking fleets and armies has been repeatedly called into question over the years, with suspicions that the numbers were inflated by monastic writers to heighten the sense of existential danger and to excuse Anglo-Saxon defeats. Nevertheless, it is likely that this was a serious threat. From the 850s onward, the nature of the Viking threat to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had changed. Large forces, bigger than those that had raided the coastline of Britain in previous decades, began to ‘over-winter’ – that is, to set up camp rather than go home over the off-season, maintaining a pattern of raiding and mounting ever more damaging and ambitious campaigns. The raid on London in 851 was effectively the dawn of this grim new day: it is recorded in the same Chronicle entry that ‘for the first time, heathen men settled over the winter’.19 It also marked the effective end of Lundenwic, both in reality – within a couple of decades the settlement had become archaeologically invisible, covered by a layer of dark earth – and in the minds of near-contemporaries.fn8 According to the retrospective account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in the 890s, the attack of 851 was launched not against Lundenwic, but against Lundenburh: against ‘fortress London’.

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