EARLY LONDON.*
A WORK which purports to contain the history of the " greatest city the world has ever seen," in two volumes of some 850 octavo pages in all, of which 100 are taken up with lists of names, is not one which could easily be (to borrow an adverb from Mr. Ruskin, and an epithet from Mr. Matthew Arnold), "entirely adequate." But of all recent books on the subject—on the early part, at least—Mr. Loftie's, perhaps, most nearly approaches to adequateness. The second volume, which deals with " Greater London," is, partly from the nature of the topics, rather scrappy. But the first volume, which deals with the City itself, is an ex- cellent summary of the early history of the City, and forms a valuable contribution to the literature of historical London. The author has evidently availed himself of all the latest researches which bear upon his subject, and has himself resorted to the fountain-head of origival documents, instead of merely following * A Ilidont of London. By W. J. Loftie, B.A., F.S.A. London: Edward Stanford. 1883. the streams of second-hand authorities. He consequently writes with freshness, vigour, and clearness. His chapters on what one may call the making of London are perhaps equal, in point of style and interest, to Mr. Green's Making of England, to which writer he gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness. But the upshot of the latest researches in the early history of London before the times of Edward the Confessor, is that very little is really known about it. The old stock beginning of histories would adequately describe that of London,—" Its origin is shrouded in the mists of antiquity." The topographer; the etymologist, and the arclubologist can reconstruct London for us, as Professor Owen from a few fragments of bones reconstructs an extinct animal ; but of story proper, Mr. Loftie has to confess that he is very much in the position of the needy knife-grinder, and has none to tell. But, happily, he is strong as a topographer and an antiquarian, and has apparently resorted to good sources for his etymology. The map called " London before the Houses," which prefaces the first volume, is fully justified in the text, and brings before the reader a striking picture of the original " Lake-fort," which the geologist and the etymologist combine with the topographer and the antiquarian to assure us was the origin of London. Its early history was like that of Rome,—the growth of a " fortified cattle pen," and pirate den, happily situate on hills close to a navigable stream and natural harbour, guarded by morass and forest on the land side, into a busy mart of foreign merchants.
Mr. Loftie withholds his belief from the old legends about Roman London. He refuses to recognise the bronze statue said to repre- sent Diana as an argument for the existence of a Roman temple on the site of St. Paul's, and equally denies that any vestiges have been found of Romano-British churches. "In the arts of house decoration, the Londoners " of that time, not unlike those of the present, " were fairly advanced, but the rooms they occupied were miserably small," and this though they were in scattered villas, surrounded at a late period of Roman occupa- tion by a wall, the date of which is not known. "All we know is that in 350 London had no wall, and in 369 the wall existed." From that year to the year 609, a blank of two centuries and a half exists in the annals of London, broken only by the statement that in 457 the British fugitives from the terrible battle of Cray- ford took refuge within the walls. Then London, as a town, ceased to exist. The Britons were unable to defend its walls, the English despised them. When London appears again on the scene, it is as the seat of a Bishop and a King, who was appointed by the Kings of Kent to preside over the East Saxons, who occupied London. From that time its name reappears at• intervals, not as the capital of an independent kingdom, but as a port subject to the predominant power, Kentish, Mercian, Northumbrian, West Saxon, or Dane, as the case may be.
Not until the days of Alfred, in 884, did it really become of importance in English history, but from that time the " area" enclosed in the circuit of the old Roman walls, "loosely " as the population "fitted into it," became practically (pace the author who objects to the title) the " capital " of England, and its citizens for many a long year the arbiters of her destinies- Indeed, until the last half-century, the cause which had the City of London on its side was pretty certain to be the cause which conquered.
Not that the City was never a house divided against itself ; on the contrary, the internal history of the City is a story of continual strife, the leading features of which are well and fairly drawn by Mr. Loftie. The City magnates, like their compeers beyond the walls, though they took the side of liberty against the Crown;were no less anxious to keep up their own petty tyrannies. There was probably some sort of struggle, before the government of the City was transferred from heredi- tary and territorial aldermen, with their probably independent " Sokes," to the centralised Merchants' Guild. The tale of the later struggle between the Merchants' Guild and the Crafts' Guilds can be told with more or less detail. It was part of a general move- ment, which took place at one time or another in all the cities of England and Europe, and is amply illustrated in the pages of Professor Stubbs and in Brentano's celebrated essay. It was the medimval form cf the perennial struggle between oligarchy and democracy, between privileged classes and the multitude, between the rich and the poor. It ended, as such struggles always end, in the victory of the many against the few, and the triumph of the workers with their hands, the crafts- men of the City Companies, over the old oligarchic families of merchants and shipowners and landowners. The revolution
did not take place without bloodshed, whether on the field of battle of Cheapside, or on the gibbet. Happily, though, for the city, the struggle within was contemporaneous with that without, and the life of Simon de Montfort runs parallel with that of Thomas FitzThomas. The final and definitive establishment df the powers of Parliament coincides with the final victory of the City Companies, when Edward III. enrolled himself amongst the Livery Armonrers.
But no sooner had the revolution been consummated than the old quarrels broke out anew. The old oligarchy became members of the new Companies. The Companies themselves became exclusive bodies, and tried to control those outside and to monopolise civic power as their predecessors had done. The Court of Aldermen became practically co-optative, and the -elections to the Common Council and to the great City offices became matters of dispute between the liverymen of the Com- panies and the commonalty of the City, and were bandied about between them, until the constitution was settled on its present basis, in 1475,—an important event, of which, by the way, Mr. Loftie takes hardly any notice. How it is that since that time the constitution of the Corporation has remained almost unchanged, he attempts no explanation. Probably it is because, with the end of the Wars of the Roses, England became a civilised country. The wealthier citizens began, with the accession of Henry VII., to spread into the country, and having attained wealth, retired from business and merged themselves in the country nobility and gentry, instead of forming an aristo- cratic class in the City itself. There was, therefore, a constant influx of new blood into the ranks of the Corporation office- bearers, and the elections being placed on a democratic basis, there was no sharp line of demarcation between one class of citizens and another. Indeed, of late years the complaint has been that the City magnates have been too little, and not too much, drawn from the " upper" classes. An oligarchy has, indeed, been formed, but it is one of locality and business, instead of blood and wealth. It is, in fact, an oligarchy, but not an aristocracy. Why this oligarchy of place exists Mr. Loftie does attempt to explain. According to him, the City was anxious to extend itself, but could not, because of the opposition of the lords of the surrounding manors, who were jealous of their power and privileges. But this explanation is hardly borne out by the facts. For he himself shows that when the City did try to .extend its boundary to include part of what is now " Farringdon Ward Without," at the expense of the Abbot of Westminster, it was able to do so ; and by a decree of the Archbishop of Canter- bury in 1222, it was also enabled to extend itself towards Temple Bar. Moreover, as late as 1550 Southwark was granted to the City, and was at first, according to the finding of the Municipal Corporations Commission in 1837, an integral part of the City, being a separate ward, electing its own alderman, in the same manner as the other wards of the City. But in 1557 this right was abolished, and Southwark has since been ruled by the Corpora- tion as a Crown colony is governed by the Colonial Office. The true explanation would seem to be that the City was willing to extend its jurisdiction, but not its privileges. It was agree- able to taxing the suburbs as it taxes them now by the coal and wine duties, but it was not willing to share with them its elec- toral rights, its self-government, nor, above all, its trading immunities.
On this last point, and on trade generally, Mr. Loftie hardly dwells enough. We hear too little of the Steel-yard, of the Jewries, Old and New, of the Lombards, of the Wool Staple, of the Merchant Adventurers, of the growth of Lloyd's, of the City markets, and of the gradual dying-out of the exclu- sive privileges of trading which formed so prominent a feature of old London life. His answer would, no doubt, be that we cannot have everything. But then he might well have spared us the concluding chapters of both volumes, which deal respec- tively with the City Corporation and the " Metropolitan Area," as they now are, and with many incidental passages which not only show a want of appreciation of the true lessons to be drawn from history, but also a want of knowledge of fact. When he tells us, for instance, that the new Law Courts are partly within the City boundary, and that, therefore, it is possible to transfer business to them -from the Guildhall, he is at issue with the City itself and the Lord Chancellor, who had to invoke the aid of an Act of Parliament, an Order in Council, and a Note of the Common Council to effect the change. So, too, he is making a blunder when he says that the "day census" refused by Parliament was carried into effect under a measure of the Common Council, as though under compulsory power. The day census, such as it was, was taken under exactly the same powers as Mr. Loftie might himself have employed, if he had chosen to take at his own expense a census of the precinct of the Savoy; that is to say, that the returns were purely voluntary, and therefore not improbably in- accurate. The study Of the history of London and its suburbs, as told by Mr. Loftie, shows us, if it shows any- thing, the superior efficacy and stability of democratic govern- ment and institutions, and is the strongest possible argument for the extension to the inhabitants of London in general (he will not allow us to say " metropolis ") of the advantages now enjoyed by a constantly diminishing population in its central area. " The most extraordinary thing about this vast area," he
says, "is the looseness of its governing system As a matter of fact, nine-tenths of the dwellers cannot distinguish between the Metropolitan Board of Works and the Board of Works, which is a department of the Government of the country, and used to be known as the-' Woods and Forests,' a title too picturesque for the present age." The wonderful in- accuracy of this last statement of a matter of fact on which any almanack would put him right, rather throws doubts on the general accuracy of Mr. Loftie as a historian. The Board of Works is not called the "Board of Works," but the " Office of Works." The " Woods and Forests " has not been found too picturesque a title for the Office of " Woods, Forests, and Land Revenues," which Mr. Loftie would quickly make acquaintance with, if he were to set to work to cut turf in the New Forest. It is clear that Mr. Loftie is not " up " in the current history of his own times, and it is a pity, therefore, that he should have disfigured his book by misleading state- ments and shallow essays on current politics, which, to say the least, are out of place.
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