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The Topography of Saxon London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

R. E. M. Wheeler
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Extract

In this note on Saxon London I am not concerned in detail with the wearisome question whether London did or did not survive through the Dark Ages of the 5th and 6th centuries. Were it not for the vague generalities of an obsessed 6th-century ‘Welshman’, writing a moral thesis probably in Brittany under difficulties which he himself deplores, no one would ever have suggested that London ceased to exist at the time of the Saxon invasions. Yet, it may be recalled, Gildas does not so much as mention London; he was not concerned with London; he was not indeed concerned with history save in so far as it could be subordinated to his propaganda against the sinners of western Britain. Whatever may have happened to the cities of the west, there is in truth no valid historical reason for supposing that London perished after the Roman period, to be born all over again in a Saxon England.

Type
Articles
Information
Antiquity , Volume 8 , Issue 31 , September 1934 , pp. 290 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1934

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References

1 Clapham, A.W., English Romanesque Architecture before the Conquest, p.52. I am much indebted to Mr Clapham for reading the present paper and for helpful suggestions.Google Scholar

2 The church of St. Martin–le–Grand may be equally early-its foundation has been variously ascribed to Cadwallein, to his followers in his memory and to Wihtraed king of Kent (694–725)—but, if so, it was refounded in 1068, and the Norman foundation is the only certain fact. See Victoria County History, London, 1, 555.

3 This church is said by Matthew Paris (13 th century) to have been a chapel of King Offa. Lives of the Abbots, ed. Wats, 1002.

4 See Kingsford, C.L., Stow’s Survey of London, 2, 304;Google Scholar and Riley, H.T., Memorials of London and London life in the xiiith, xivth and xvth centuries, p.653. In 1417, the rector of St. Peter’s, Cornhill, was confirmed by the Mayor and Aldermen in his customary right to precedence in the Whit Monday processions, on the ground that St. Peter’s was ‘the first church founded in London.’Google Scholar

5 Stow cites an otherwise unknown work of Jocelyn of Furness as his authority.

6 See Oman, C., England before the Norman Conquest, 7th ed., p.178.Google Scholar

7 Without emphasis, another possibility may be suggested. There is every likelihood that the London basilica and forum were of the type represented at Sikhester, Caerwent and elsewhere, and so approximated to the normal plan of the headquarters–building of a Roman fortress. Now in the military headquarters the central room at the back of the basilica was the official regimental shrine; and it is likely enough that the corresponding room (emphasized at Silchester by an apse) at the back of the civil basilica fulfilled an equivalent function, as a sort of municipal chapel. Today, the high altar of St. Peter’s, Cornhill, stands over the site of the central room at the back of the London basilica. Does St. Peter’s thus represent, in all topographical literalness, a continuous tradition from the time when Christianity first became the official religion of Roman London, with an official altar in the old municipal shrine?

8 Royal Commission on Hist. MSS., 9th Report, p. 44a.

9 The Lists upon which the present maps are based will be included in a forthcoming London Museum publication, London and the Saxons.

10 It is sometimes asserted that the martyred king’s body was preserved during this period in St. Helen’s church, Bishopsgate, but the statement has no ancient authority, and seems to be a blunder of Entick, J., History and Survey of London, etc.(1766) 3, 398.Google Scholar

11 See Stenton, F.M. and Jeffries Davis, E., Norman London (Historical Assn., 1934), map.Google Scholar

12 Whether we should follow the medieval Lucius tradition to the length of presuming a continuous Christian cult at St. Peter’s throughout the Dark Ages is questionable. Such a continuity is not, indeed, impossible. On general grounds, the lingering of Christianity in a sub–Roman slum is scarcely less likely than its active survival in the crofts of the ‘Roman citizens’ of the Celtic outlands. At the best, however, we must suppose that the Christianity of 6th–century London was a withered growth.

13 See London: its Origin and Early Development (1923), p.194. It may be added that the old division has been retained in the allocation of parishes to the two modern deaneries of London.Google Scholar