ROMAN LONDON
By RUFUS BUXTON
NOTHING is more intriguing to the imagination than the work being carried out by the London Roman and Mediaeval Excava- tion Council—the work of bringing to light the Roman wall. It is the bombing which has brought the opportunity. The digging is going on in one of the largest flat areas of ruin—east of Aldersgate Street and south of St. Giles' Church, Cripplegate, at the north-west corner of the old Roman city. Here there are acres and acres of bare ground, pitted with deep basements, with only occasionally a shell of a warehouse standing. The Roman wall of London, built some time between A.D. 120 and A.D. 150, was rather loosely flung about the city, in what appears at first sight as a rough semi-circle, with its western edge near Blackfriars Bridge and its eastern edge where the Tower stands. Its western edge was on the high ground
▪ overhanging the estuary of the River Fleet. The wall was built in a series of straight alignments, and near St. Giles', Cripplegate, where the present digging is going on, an angle of it breaks sharply into the semi-circle ; probably because of boggy ground. The wall con- tained an area of about 350 acres, and the houses near it would probably have been only hutments, as it did not enclose a compactly built-up area. For this reason no particular finds of pottery or coins are to be expected near St. Giles'.
In the search for Roman London it is mainly mediaeval London that is being dug up, and the most important discoveries are those of Neville's Inn and of the wall itself at Barber's Hall—where you can see it built directly on a Roman foundation. It is built of Kentish ragstone, with courses of thin tiles, probably made in the Moor- fields area to the north of the city, the site also of the later mediaeval brickfields. As brickmakers the Romans were first-rate, but they did not use bricks for complete structures. The source of pottery found in this area was probably three brick kilns discovered by Christopher Wren on the present site of St. Paul's while he was "rummaging all the ground thereabouts." If one wishes to be dramatic about Roman London one says it is "full fathom five," but the present excavation is being carried out where the Roman ground-level is only ten feet below our own ; though the main part of Roman London is twenty or thirty feet below us. Sometimes the mediaeval foundation- level is even lower than the Roman, where Roman structures have been underpinned by later ones ; and everywhere great slabs of concrete of modem times have penetrated to the old world.
The digging is being carried out on the private. property of some twenty or thirty owners, some of whom have been much more co- operative than others. Some have stipulated that the floors and the walls be replaced as they were. Nobody who has not been there can realise quite how desolate the landscape is. I went there on a foggy, frosty day, and felt that a Roman might well walk out of the mist ; everything is so mysterious as you stand by the wall inter- sections of Neville's Inn, with the high tower of St. Giles', Cripple- gate, only just in sight. On this day there was no digging ; it was too frosty. The workmen were standing about by braziers which they fed With odd bits of wood from the site. They seemed like the elements of some encamped mediaeval army. Among these immobilised workers the indefatigable figure of Mr. Grimes, of the London Museum, moved swiftly from one floor level to another, measuring, exploring with his trowel, and giving instructions to his team.
The first day I went there I talked with one of the diggers, who for four months had been working what was to him a vast and unprofitable area. That day he had dug up his first find—a small rim of dark mediaeval pottery. He showed it to me with a schoolboy's enthusiasm, bringing it to light from its latest hiding- place—a fragment of modern brick. Mr. Grimes afterwards ex- plained to me that it is not always easy to get people to understand that not only the bits and pieces of finds are important ; the actual structure is almost more essential to the understanding of a place like the London of the past. It is the close association of the structural remains with datable finds that is vital. On this foggy day, hearing the occasional hooter of a ship on the Thames, one was reminded how near to the river all Roman London lay, and one seemed to be carried back into the world when many " fleets " (as individual ships were called) lay in the Fleet Estuary as high as Holborn Bridge, and more shipping still in the mouth of the Wallbrook, which flowed through the centre of the city between its east and west hills. Seeing a six-foot ditch which Mr. Grimes cannot account for, I felt tempted to make it into a tributary of the Wallbrook or Fleet.
In this burnt-out business area you can see down in Neville's Inn several feet of charred bricks which were darkened in the Great Fire of 1666. Near by are so many other walls of dark brick of modern times that the two are hard to distinguish ; at one period clearance from both the fires of this war and the earlier fire was proceeding simultaneously. Looking to the south that day you could not see the dome of St. Paul's, but knew that the Roman wall went on down to the river just to the west of it. There is no sign that the Romans ever built a huge temple in London. The present site of St. Paul's is supposedly that of a Roman temple to Diana, but Wren wrote at the time he was laying the foundations of the cathedral : "I must assert that having changed all the foundations of old St. Paul's, and upon that occasion rummaged all the ground thereabouts, and being very desirous to find some footsteps of such a temple, I could not discover any."
Standing on this site of the digging, one does not fully realise that Roman London was on a hill—or rather on two hills divided by the Wallbrook opposite London Bridge. There seems to have been no proper settlement here before the Romans came. What did the Romans see? Mostly marsh and mud flat. Approaching from the Thames Estuary and the river with all its creeks they would see a little rise of ground on the north bank where the Thames was narrow enough to bridge. A settlement on the south bank would have been impossible. The north bank, in any case, was more suitable for the town because it focused the roads of the greater part of the rest of the country. One can imagine these straight roads, Ermine Street and Watling Street, leading to the small, precise City entrances of Bishopsgate and Newgate.
All around were the cries of wading birds, and one must reflect how much of London has since gained ground to the cry of retreating waders, about the saddest sound in all the bird kingdom. It is hard for us to imagine today, as the Romans saw it, a sunset viewed upstream from London Bridge, above the grey of marshes and the brown of heaths broken with trees. There is a story told of London soon after the bombing. Some children were found several miles from their homes, and were asked how they had got to the centre of London. They said : "We just come through the fields." Fields to them were these new pitted, ruined fields ; they had never seen green ones. Grass has hardly any hold on this terrain, but the purple loosestrife has become a joy in summer, softening some of the sharp edges of the destruction, and the yellow coltsfoot has invaded equally. Over these fields, which are like some vast ruined monastery—or for that matter like the ruined Palatinate in Rome—the small black redstarts fly in summer, and throw out their crystal-clear carrying call. Lovers of old ruins, they have found the new ones, and where the Romans walked you can see, in the evenings, members of the London Naturalist Society armed with field glasses. And quietly, month after month, the excavation goes on.
Previous page
