Robert Wynn Jones - The Flower of All Cities: The History of London from Earliest Times to the Great Fire

First published 2019

Amberley Publishing

The Hill, Stroud

Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

www.amberley-books.com

Copyright Dr Robert Wynn Jones, 2019

The right of Dr Robert Wynn Jones to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781445691350 (HARDBACK)

ISBN 9781445691367 (eBOOK)

Typesetting by Aura Technology and Software Services, India.

Printed in the UK.

Contents

A large part of London, and almost all of the old walled City that lay at its heart, was burned down over the space of a few short days during the Great Fire of 26 September 1666. This book attempts as it were to unearth from the ashes something of the already age-old and burnished City that had gone before. The City founded by the Romans in the middle of the first century AD, on the damp maritime frontier of their vast continental empire, and named by them Londinium. The City abandoned by the Romans at the beginning of what some still think of as the Dark Ages of the seaborne Saxons and Vikings, and known by the former in turn as Lundenwic and Lundenburg. And the City of the later Middle Ages or Medieval period, and the post-Medieval or early Modern, one of the first true world-cities, called by some Londinopolis. A City of bustling waterfronts and imposing walls, of praying spires and nodding masts, of plunging shadow and abiding light. That which the poet William Dunbar in 1501 described as sovereign of Cities and the flower of Cities all.

The City of London as presently defined incorporates some areas that lie a little outside the original walls (including Southwark, south of the river). Pre-Great Fire Greater London, that is to say the more-or-less continuously built-up area, extended even farther out, especially along the Thames: on the north side of the river, as far west as the West End and Westminster, as far north as Spitalfields and Shoreditch and as far east as Stepney, Wapping, Shadwell, Ratcliff, Limehouse, Poplar and Blackwall; and on the south side, as far west as Lambeth and Vauxhall, as far south as Borough and Newington, and as far east as Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, but not as far as Deptford, Greenwich, and Woolwich, which remained isolated settlements. The Great Fire was substantially confined to the old walled city.

I wish to acknowledge the great help given by the Guildhall Library and by the Museum of London, and Jon Jackson, Nikki Embery and Shaun Barrington of Amberley in seeing the project through to publication. I would also like to thank my wife, Heather, and my younger son Gethin, for their forbearance, and for their assistance in the production of the maps.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Emrys, who died while I was writing it. Goodbye, lovely man.

The bedrock on which London is built is arranged in the form of a basin, with its base buried beneath the city, and its rim exposed at the surface in the Chilterns to the north and in the North Downs to the south. The basin is filled with, in ascending order, chalk, London Clay, and Thames alluvium. Chalk is composed of the skeletal remains of innumerable individually microscopic algae and associated organisms that once flourished in an ancient ocean around 100 million years ago. It is a porous rock and contains an abundant underground water supply, capable of being tapped into through so-called Artesian wells. London Clay, in contrast, is non-porous, impervious to the flow of water, and poorly drained, and often associated with presently or formerly marshy areas. It is constituted of detrital clay, silt and sand as well as abundant plant and primitive animal fossils, for which latter the site of Abbey Wood in south-east London is famous, accumulated on the strandline of a sub-tropical sea some 50 million years ago. Thames alluvium is formed of material deposited along the watercourse of the citys river, past and present. The Thames assumed its present course when it was diverted during the Ice Age a few hundred thousand years ago. During glacial periods of the Ice Age, woolly mammoths roamed the then tundra around what is now Canary Wharf, and reindeer around Royal Oak. During the last inter-glacial, elephants and hippopotamuses wallowed in water-holes in what is now Trafalgar Square.

The human occupation of Britain began during the Ice Age. Footprints have been found in inter-glacial deposits at Happisburgh in Norfolk that date back around 750,000 years, and actual human remains in inter-glacial deposits at Boxgrove in West Sussex that date back around half a million years. It appears, though, that humans were essentially unable to live in Britain during glacial periods, and only really became established here in the post-glacial period, during the thaw, and the regrowth of the wildwood, commencing some fifteen thousand or so years ago.

There is albeit sparse archaeological evidence from Stratford to the east of London, Southwark to the south, Hounslow and Uxbridge to the west, and Hampstead to the north, for hunting and gathering activity in the Late Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age); and for woodland clearance and farming in the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) and Neolithic (New Stone Age), between the eighth and fourth centuries BCE (Merriman, 1990; see also, for example, Bishop et al., 2017). There are also the remains of a Mesolithic flint-tool manufactory at North Woolwich, a Mesolithic timber structure of as yet undetermined function at Vauxhall, a Neolithic henge at Hackney Wells, and a reportedly Neolithic barrow-burial at what is now known as King Henrys Mound in Richmond Park.

Further Reading

Bishop et al., 2017; Clements, 2010; Merriman, 1990; Sidell et al., 2000.

There is archaeological evidence from a number of localities around London for at least transient settlement and associated activity, by Ancient Britons or Celts, in the Bronze Age, in the third and second millennia BC/BCE, and in the Iron Age, in the first millennium BC/BCE. Bronze Age timbers still survive at Plumstead, together with a number of Bronze Age burial mounds, including the so-called Boudiccas Grave on Parliament Hill, and the Shrewsbury Tumulus on Shooters Hill (Figures 1, 2). And a number of hill-forts or enclosures survive from the Iron Age, including Caesars Camp on Wimbledon Common, and Ambresbury Banks and Loughton Camp, both in the timeless wilds of Epping Forest (Figures 3, 1c, colour plates). Grims Dyke, an intermittently preserved bank-and-ditch earthwork running for some miles through North-West London, from Pinner Green, or possibly Ruislip, to Harrow Weald Common, or possibly Stanmore, also survives from the Iron Age (Figure 2c). It is thought to have marked the boundary of the territory occupied by a tribe of Ancient Britons or Celts known as the Catuvellauni, which had its heartland on the north side of the Thames, in and around London and the northern Home Counties, and its capital at Verlamion (modern St Albans in Hertfordshire). The Catuvellaunian tribal territory was bordered to the north and east by those of the Corieltauvi, Iceni and Trinovantes, to the south by those of the Cantiaci and Atrebates, and to the west by that of the Dobunii. Incidentally, it is not known for certain what the Ancient Britons called London. Coates (1998) has suggested Lowonidonjon, meaning something like settlement on the Thames, and deriving in part from a pre-Celtic name for the London section of the Thames, Plowonida (river too wide to ford). According to the antiquarian John Stow, in his magisterial Survay of London, written in the Year 1598: