THE HALLOWED SPOTS OF ANCIENT LONDON. INTRODUCTION. THE CITY AND ITS SITE. To one of a nation which has produced the finest landscape painters and the best descriptive poets, it is not difficult to imagine London under several of its ancient aspects. Aided by local and historical knowledge, the Englishman may stand upon the City bridges, or on the Southwark shore of the Thames, and draw correct and striking pictures of the ancient scene. Correct, because guided by knowledge; picturesque, because London under any of its changing aspects, and more particularly under its earlier ones, could but show the beauty of both its site and its immediate neighbourhood. We have it before us in its primitive aspect. The Thames--wider than it is now, for it entered the ocean at a much higher point-flowed between either shore of the present counties of Middlesex and Surrey, as swift and as clear a stream as rivers under tidal influence usually are. A marsh, portionally overflowed at high-water, formed the Surrey foreground; the Middlesex shore was undulating meadow-land, varied here and there by breadths of primeval trees; and these lent their shadow, and dipped their branches often into the stream itself. Lesser streams emerged from the gloom of the woods, and flowed down by turfy banks into the river; whilst at the rear stretched a dense woodland, forming a portion of what was afterwards known as the forest of Middlesex. This woodland extended on either side; to the west towards the swampy site of the present Westminster, to the east towards the marsh now known as the Isle of Dogs-at one period or another covered with trees of gigantic growth, which, swept down in some great convulsion of nature as a whirlwind or an earthquake, are found-even occasionally at this day-root upwards in the soil. B To the north of this forest scene rose a heathy upland, of which the present Hampstead Heath formed a small portion. This probably was never more than partially wooded, as considerable portions of the soil bear few signs of the detritus. of forests, but alternate gravel and swamp were only capable of nourishing a scanty undergrowth. Towards the east, dense woods again covered the site of the present Islington, and so stretched away to that part of the Middlesex forest now known as Enfield Chase. Such was the primitive aspect of the site of the great modern city of the world-a wilderness varied by stream and upland, precisely as may be seen at the present day in New Zealand, or the more remote states of North America, where Nature, fresh from the Eternal hand, "Sits lovely in her native russet." The Celtic or Iberian successors of those pre-historic races of which antiquarian and ethnological research is gathering up so many traces, may have at first settled down upon the muddy shore to the east of the future Londinium; and thus, facing as it were an open estuary at high-water, laid by degrees the foundations of a little community of fishers and traders. For that the Thames met the ocean at a point very much higher than at present, is no mere matter of hypothesis. The low levels of the Essex and a portion of the Kentish shore, the vast embankments of the Romans in an after-day, and the nature of the soil, afford unmistakable evidence ; in fact, the whole of the eastern shores of England have undergone extraordinary changes. The estuary of the Garruenos, like that of the Thames, swept at the date of the Roman invasion over a vast area now covered by towns, villages, and broad levels of verdant marshland.* Tacitus himself tells of this uncontrolled dominion of the ocean on our shores. "Nor is it on the sea-coast only that the flux and reflux of the tides are perceived; for the swell of the waves forces its way into the recesses of the land, forming bays and islands in the heart of the country, and foaming amidst hills and valleys, as in its natural channel." + London, under its Roman masters, occupied at first but a confined area; as the traces discovered of its earliest circumvallation and of sepulchral deposits in such situations as Bow Lane, Moorgate Street, and Bishopsgate Within, would show. The centre may be taken at about the top of the modern Fish Street Hill; whilst its northern wall ran probably along the course of what is now Cornhill, and Billiter Street.§ But these limits were in time greatly overrun, and a new wall of most massive construction—and as it remained far into the Middle Ages-was built round an immensely extended area, from the Tower in the east, to Ludgate in the west. A bridge was thrown across the Thames-uniting the great northern to the southern + Vita Agric. cap. 10. * Ives Garianonum. 8vo. 1774. Illustrations of Roman London, by C. R. Smith, p. 12. § Ibid. p. 12. road-through the vast forest of Anderida-and so to the ports which gave such ready access to the shores of Gaul. An amphitheatre stood without the walls of Ludgate, and from certain indications somewhere about the site of the old Fleet Prison; and the western end of Watling Street, as well as the acclivity of Ludgate, south and west, were crowned by temples and public buildings. "A statue in bronze of Hadrian, of heroic size, was one of the public ornaments of London* ;" and from such scanty evidence as can be afforded by architectural fragments, we are led to the conclusion that Londinium vied with the provincial cities as much in architecture as she excelled them in commercial opulence. The streets seem to have been narrow and continuous; whilst the northern and north-eastern parts of the town were occupied by magnificent villas. Of these the hypocausts, the tesselated pavements, the wall-paintings, alike with the fragments of pottery and of works in bronze, attest to the wealth and civilization of Roman London. In possession of the latter, Londinium must have rivalled, or rather far excelled the Roman cities of Gaul and Germany, if the specimens dredged up from the bed of the Thames at the time, and since the rebuilding of London Bridge, be taken in evidence. More than one of these -as Mr. Roach Smith has well said—"is a masterpiece of ideal grace and beauty."+ It may be that its abundance of iron and other metals, gave to Britain a pre-eminence in the art of casting, during a portion of the time at least that it existed as a Roman province; and that its producers of works in metal were as numerous a body as the smiths of the Norman era. But these results of wealth and civilization passed away as the figments of a dream-though not we believe without leaving as residue a physical heritage, which, in its best points of culture and mixed race, is with us at this hour. Nor, may we be sure, did such an era pass by without there being gathered up into that great oblivion which has no voice, efforts and sacrifices and self-abnegations as noble as well as memorable as any as it is our purpose to here set down. For man's noble and godlike acts are limited to neither creed nor age. A period of darkness follows, to lighten which, we have little but monkish fables; though containing within them some portion of real fact, we may be sure. When the veil is lifted, and the dim light of historic truth again assists us, London is in the hands of a people too rude to appreciate the material results of culture, too fierce to be awed by any magnificence which might still exist in the ruins of temple, amphitheatre, or forum; for they, whom neither the rough sublimity of the waves and tempests of their native seas, or the gloom of dense forests, could awe, were to be touched by little but the superstitious terrors of their heathen creed. But when they begin to settle down, when the noblest tendencies of their race towards freedom and citizenship begin to shape out practical ends; then-and it is curious to mark it-the * Illustrations of Roman London, p. 65. + Ibid. p. 68. London of later times, both as regards locality and institutions, may be seen arising, as we see in the newly germinated acorn, the future oak. In the year 306, London is, according to the Saxon Chronicle, first inwalled; that is to say, the breaches in the mighty Roman wall are repaired, and no great while after, the Saxon citizens become Christianized, and found St. Paul's, upon the ruins of the great heathen temple. Then variously through two centuries-comes apparent retrogression of several kinds, till in the year 839, London is destroyed by the Danes. But they are conquerors and masters whose blood, language, and institutions give much more to posterity than they destroy. Peace again settles down with our great Alfred ; St. Paul's Minster and Westminster Abbey are magnificently raised from their burnt ashes, and the vicissitudes and changes of some century and a half bring us to Norman times, and a new phase in the civil and religious history of London. In this history, the natural results of Papal domination and the power of the Church, gradually appear; religious orders and monastic institutions rise up on every side, and, though less prominently, civic wealth and civic freedom make important and substantial progress. In the year 1176, the citizens of London found their bridge of stone; in 1190* one of their number, Henry Fitz-Alwine, a Norman, is constituted mayor; in 1224 an important point is gained for constitutional justicethe law courts of England are permanently established in Westminster Hall; in 1297 the forest of Middlesex is disafforested, and the citizens build houses and form gardens without the walls; in 1355 they send for the first time four citizens to Parliament, and thus make civil progress in proportion as spiritual domination decays; the result of which is eventually the Reformation, and its great changes. In looking over the quaint "bird's-eye view" of London drawn fifteen years after the Reformation by Ralph Aggas, † the rural aspect of the city, at that date, is strikingly curious to a generation who only know London as one enormous area of bricks and mortar. Though the Reformation, through changing the ownership of so much of the city land, had already given a great impetus to building both within and without the walls, large portions of it must have yet borne more the appearance of country villages scattered amidst woodland, than a city capable of losing, as it had in the previous century, at least, according to Stow, as many as 30,000 inhabitants at once by the plague. A large portion of the space near the eastern wall seems occupied by lanes and gardens, other spaces are similarly covered, and many of the conventual gardens are of great size. Looking beyond the walls, open fields lie east and north of the Tower; next comes the great swamp beyond Moorgate, which was not drained till 1606-7; next is the open space of Smithfield with fields beyond; and then Holborn, stretching from the postern of Newgate, wears the appearance of a wide country road, Cunningham. Liber Albus gives this date as 1189. * + Civitas Londinum Ano. Dni. circiter MDLX. By Ralph Aggas. |