Part 1
1
Points of departure
London is not only one of the world’s great modern cities but also, and perhaps more unexpectedly, one of its most intensely studied archaeological sites. Today’s bright and glittering City, the ‘square mile’ of high finance, perpetuates the site of a Roman town that commanded a strategic crossing of the river Thames. Excavations on City building sites fuel an archaeological research that continues to reveal new things about London’s Roman origins, offering rare insight into the empire of which it was part. These investigations explore a complex mound of rubbish that lifts today’s streets some 9 metres above the virgin soil. The core of this study area is defined by the old town’s walls, whose circuit can still be traced from place names and fragmentary ruins: extending from the Old Bailey in the west, past the Barbican, London Wall and Aldgate, to the Tower of London in the east. South of the river an archaeological landscape of equal complexity and no lesser antiquity, the outwork of Southwark, stretches back from London Bridge along Borough High Street to a point a little beyond the church of St George the Martyr. A dense hinterland of cemeteries, suburbs, and satellite sites surrounded these built-up areas either side of the river.
Many hundreds of excavations have taken place across this busy landscape, generating thousands of scientific reports: each offering dense technical descriptions of disconnected fragments. Even more work remains unpublished, leaving a cumbersome archive of material awaiting analysis. An intimidating mass of part-digested detail burdens research, but is no superfluity. London emerges as a uniquely important Roman site because of the quantity and quality of its archaeological documentation: no other Roman city presents such depths of measured riches.
Many excellent books have already been written about Roman London, but new discoveries offer a constant challenge to former understanding. 1 In particular, the evidence of tree-ring dating, or dendrochronology, has radically improved our ability to set changes to London’s fabric within their historical context. By way of example: dendrochronology shows that some ancient structures built no earlier than the spring of ad 60 were razed to the ground, and that post-fire rebuilding drew on timbers felled for the purpose before the autumn of ad 62. These dates are wholly the product of archaeological science, advanced independently of any historical account, but correspond with Tacitus’ account of London’s destruction in the revolt lead by the Icenian queen Boudica in ad 61. In this case the archaeological and written sources align so closely that scholars can confidently combine them in their studies of Neronian London. This marriage of evidence runs counter, however, to an academic hesitancy to link changes in the archaeological record with events described by history. 2 This is often a sensible caution since historical accounts aren’t entirely reliable, treat only with the events that interested a distant elite society, and leave immense gaps. But London’s Roman archaeology includes dozens of precisely dated activities akin to those of ad 60–62 that are equally the stuff of history. They have not usually been treated as such. Several recent studies have sought to explain local phenomena through reference to some form of environmental determinism—the cumulative weight of changing tides, erosion, and bioturbation—whilst failing to properly acknowledge the importance of the historical event as a force for change. By recognizing that alterations to London’s fabric were often the consequence of political decision making, and setting such changes within their context, we open up new ways of understanding not only London but the course of Roman history.
London’s greatest contribution to archaeological research stems from our understanding of how and when the city changed, which begs the more exciting question of why change happened. The closer our description of these changes, the greater the reward from their study. This book is consequently presented as a historically framed narrative: a biography in which each chapter explores the evidence for a closely defined period of London’s history. Inevitably, the process of setting disparate fragments of archaeological evidence into a linear narrative risks giving misleading coherence to data that includes many areas of uncertainty, and some may shudder at the precision of the dating proposed here. A vital purpose, however, is to show that the city cannot be treated as a fixed destination in the past: an artefact of some coherent timeless Roman moment. London was, as it remains, a place in constant evolution experienced differently from year to year. It was recognizably Roman for at least 365 years, if not always ruled from Rome during this period. This is a longer span than stretched from the death of England’s first Queen Elizabeth to the twentieth-century accession of her modern namesake. We can no more expect Constantinian London to offer an intelligible guide to its Claudian counterpart than we would treat today’s London as the equal of its Tudor predecessor.
It is also necessary to recognize that at most times Roman London was nowhere near as significant a place as its modern heir. It was a provincial town on the periphery of an empire of cities. At its greatest extent Rome’s empire embraced a territory of 4 million square kilometres containing at least 55 million inhabitants, possibly more. 3 Some 11–12 per cent of this population is thought to have lived in one of over 2000 cities, concentrated most densely in the eastern provinces. Most were small places, each home to fewer than 10,000 people. London grew larger than average, perhaps housing over 30,000 people at its peak. 4 This made it the biggest city in Britain but it remained relatively inconsequential when compared to the greater metropolitan centres of the Mediterranean. It is therefore no surprise that London makes only fleeting appearances in the histories written in antiquity, and was never considered a place of interest in its own right. London gained but rare mention, chiefly on occasions when it served as a theatre of war, received imperial visits, or appeared in administrative lists assembled against bureaucratic need.
Some arguments
If Londinium mattered so little to Rome’s historians, why should it matter to us? The quality of its archaeological documentation captures our attention, but an abundance of data is no proof of importance. Indeed, some have questioned whether the Roman city is a useful subject of study at all. 5 Whilst there are interesting questions to be asked about the ideological nature of urbanism, cities sit within wider landscapes of political power and it is these that are more commonly studied. But cities remain curious and precious artefacts. Each was differently constituted and differently inhabited, and there is much to be learnt through an exploration of these differences. As Miko Flohr and Andrew Wilson explain in introducing their study of Roman Pompeii: ‘trying to write the history of an individual town, however complicated it is, is not a cul-de-sac, but an essential part of debating the history of Roman urbanism, and of urban economies in the Roman world’. 6 This welcome advice is keenly embraced in the pages that follow.
London was unquestionably a particular place, and its examination casts a unique light on the workings of the Roman Empire. This takes us into many areas of current debate, where fashions of scholarly interest reflect on contemporary concerns. Some of these issues will be addressed in the chapters that follow, but I start from the premise that London was built by and for the exercise of imperial power. My first studies of London were framed by the work of Moses Finley, who stressed the self-governing characteristics of ancient cities drawn into the Roman Empire through the co-option of local elites. 7 I now believe that this led me to understate the importance of the provincial administration in the creation and government of London. Britain’s conquest by Claudius, in ad 43, made it a late addition to Roman territories—one that remained closely associated with imperial authority because of the legions based here. It was a frontier territory at the edge of the known world and housed an exceptional concentration of Roman military power. This had an enormous impact on the trajectory of urban life in the province and on London in particular.
Archaeology shows that London was born of Roman conquest, and the stories that would give it greater antiquity are groundless. Before Roman rule, as in its aftermath, the Thames was a formidable barrier and likely frontier. The London basin was consequently something of a backwater until the Roman conquest unified southern Britain (Chapter 4). London was created as part of the apparatus of control that Rome imposed on its conquered territory, at which time the river port and crossing became vital (Fig. 1.1). The Roman settlement wasn’t inspired by local need or fuelled by local desire, but was the creature of colonial ambition and underwritten by the immigration of peoples new to the British Isles. This made it a different sort of place to cities where urban living had longer ancestry, and political authority could be delegated to local aristocrats. London remained an administrative centre for as long as Rome governed Britain, housing important institutions and officials whose patronage gave London its architecture and put food and drink on its tables.
Fig. 1.1 The peoples and places of northern Gaul and southern Britain in the early Roman period (shown largely using modern place names). London’s centrality to the Roman settlement pattern and road network can be contrasted with its more peripheral location in the late Iron Age as shown in Fig. 4.2. Drawn by Fiona Griffin.
A strong case can be made for finding London’s origins in a fort built to house the invasion forces of ad 43 (Chapter 5). It has become unfashionable to credit the Roman army with a significant degree of agency in the making of Britain’s cities, in reaction to former exaggerations of the achievements of military engineering. There is, however, a growing body of evidence to suggest that London was built and rebuilt as a consequence of decisions made by the provincial government and this study forcefully questions the prevailing view that the forces that established London ‘were driven by indigenous and immigrant groups, but very little by military or imperial administration’. 8 The army was sporadically a major presence, and some projects involved military engineering. It is important, however, to avoid the more simplistic binary oppositions that formerly framed debate over London’s origins. Distinctions between military and civilian, administrative and mercantile, or Roman and native were not clear-cut and tend to hinder rather than aid understanding.
London presents unique Roman architectures. Its urban form was the invention of different episodes of public investment, often channelled through the governor and other senior commands. This prompts us to reassess the role of imperial politics in shaping the city. Much of what we find was invented to support the supply of the Roman forces and the movements of goods and taxes required by Rome. This mattered enormously in a province where military campaigns stretched logistical supply, much of which directed through London’s port and markets. Private shippers were involved, but their services met government need. Elsewhere in the Roman world the institutionalized organization of supplies encompassed the annona, which was of central importance to the grain supply of Rome. The needs of Britain’s administration were more modest, and we know little about the formal structures adopted to serve them. From an archaeological point of view, however, there are similarities worth exploring and an important part of the argument developed here is that London’s fortunes were closely tied to some kind of directed annona supply. 9 If so, this would have been a procuratorial concern. The procurator was responsible for the emperor’s estate and the financial aspects of provincial administration, and was apparently based in London by ad 60. He occupied a position of rival importance to that of the governor, the imperial legate, who held military and judicial command. The procurator’s sphere of influence necessarily extended throughout the province, and is likely to have contributed to the management of landscapes of production in London’s hinterland (Chapters 14 and 15). The Roman state needed raw materials of the sort found within the south-east, including grain, timber, leather, salt, livestock, iron, clay, wool, and stone. The availability of such materials, within reach of a well-connected port that boasted a large workforce with idle winters, made London a sensible location for seasonal industry. Local and imported produce was converted into saleable goods through busy workshops and markets.
Whilst London benefitted from the economic advantages of its privileged position within the provincial infrastructure, its dependency on Rome left it vulnerable. The history of the Roman city charts a tension between the driving forces of imperial expansion and the checks of adverse circumstance, reflecting also on the waxing and waning of Rome’s interest in Britain. Since London depended on external inputs it remained especially vulnerable to exogenous influence and shock. Like all places in the Roman world it suffered at times of war, plague, and famine. The adverse effects of such events would have been amplified by London’s reliance on a workforce swelled by immigration and an economy built around the needs of long-distance supply.
The narrative in brief
The story set out in the following chapters, reconstructed from the detail of archaeological discovery, can briskly be summarized as follows. After London’s initial foundation, perhaps reusing a camp built at the time of the Claudian conquest, it became a supply hub at the heart of the conquered territory. Several stages in this exercise are tentatively identified. The Claudian encampment may first have been converted into an operational base c. ad 48, involving the construction of a network of military-engineered roads that facilitated forward supply from the river port (Chapter 6). The settlement infrastructure was transformed in a sweeping exercise of re-planning c. ad 52, before the city was further enlarged at the end of that decade (Chapter 7). These changes accompanied London’s development into the principal centre of imperial power within Roman Britain. This busy frontier town became a principal target of the rebellion of ad 60/61, the repression of which resulted in London’s military reoccupation and the re-engineering of the site (Chapters 8 and 9). Further waves of investment followed military campaigns launched by Flavian emperors (ad 69–96), whose commitment to the subjugation of the British Isles was reflected in improvements to London’s port (Chapters 10–12). This was the period when London gained most of its public infrastructure, including its amphitheatre, forum, and numerous baths and temples. Some of this investment may have followed the organizing influence of a dominant procuratorial presence, meeting political goals determined by interested imperial regimes.
Growth continued into the early second century, culminating in major Hadrianic building programmes when London neared its peak (Chapter 13). In the late 120s, London was again devastated by fire, and circumstantial evidence hints that this was the consequence of renewed warfare (Chapters 19 and 20). Following this destruction a commanding new fort was built to house a garrison and the city was restored. Late Hadrianic and Antonine London retained an important role in military provisioning, although this was increasingly directed along east-coast shipping routes, thereby reducing the need to move supplies from ship to road. Despite the setbacks of the Boudican and Hadrianic fires, London’s early Roman occupation was characterized by busy cycles of construction. This created a densely populated working city that also housed a wealthy community prepared to invest in architectures of private luxury and public munificence (Chapter 21). A new and more confident elite architecture emerged in the early Antonine period, following a wider fashion for the adoption of Hellenized styles of sophisticated living.
A different situation prevailed in the later second century, when growth was reversed and housing densities reduced (Chapter 22). The evidence of change is incontrovertible, but its scale and cause remain much debated. The importance of London’s late second-century contraction demands emphasis: life simply didn’t continue as before. There are grounds for believing that the Antonine plague, an epidemic that swept through the Roman Empire in the mid-160s, was an important contributory factor. This may have encouraged the redeployment of military and administrative staff to other centres from which annona supply could be better organized. Although London was diminished it continued to provide an important stopping point in the Samian trade into the late second century, perhaps with an increased reliance on market supply. At the very end of the second century, and after some decades of neglect, London’s port was rebuilt and enlarged in operations that imply a significant increase in official traffic. The dating of these changes suggests that London’s port may have been used to support troop movements between Britain and the continent, in events that eventually placed Severus and his heirs in command of the Roman world. As before, London benefitted from the attention and investment that attended the imperial ambitions of a new regime (Chapter 23). One of the most impressive achievements of this period was the building of London’s town wall, perhaps coinciding with a wholescale reform of the administrative arrangements for ruling Britain. From this point onwards the walled city formed part of a far more complex landscape of places from which Roman power was exercised (Chapter 24).
London may have taken another downturn around the middle of the third century, when the Roman Empire came under particular stress (Chapter 25). The demolition of London’s port, and changes in regional production and long-distance supply, hint at a radical change in the annona. The reorganization of supply in the face of exogenous shock, perhaps sparked by another episode of plague in the 250s, might account for later redundancies in London’s urban fabric. This included the closure of most of London’s waterfront quays, followed by the creation of temporary defences along the riverfront. London was transformed from being an open port into a defended administrative enclave. These political events were accompanied by sweeping changes to the ways in which Londoners lived and died. This was particularly evident in the rise of new belief systems and different burial customs. New approaches to the conceptualization of Roman imperial authority followed regime change, whilst some of the most profound changes to the ways in which people lived, thought, and died may have been provoked—at least in part—by the pandemics described in the historical sources.
Towards the end of the third century the city was again revived, probably involving new settlement and a thorough reconfiguration of systems of regional production and supply (Chapter 26). In this way late antique London regained its important role as a place of government, serving briefly as the capital city of the usurpers Carausius and Allectus (Chapter 27). Subsequent cycles of both decline and renewal can be read from the evidence of town houses, burials, and defences. These witness the effects of Roman imperial strategy, as when expeditions to Britain in the late 360s may have stimulated construction programmes. An ensuing political neglect of the north-west provinces was echoed in the neglect of London (Chapter 28). Troop withdrawals to support campaigns on the continent in the 380s may also have had repercussions in London, and foreshadowed the eventual collapse of the Roman administration (Chapter 29). Whatever the direct cause, the city ceased to care for its streets and traffic diminished to a trickle before the end of the fourth century. The place that had previously flourished as home to the agencies of Rome’s administration appears to have become both unnecessary and unsustainable. Some suburban estates fared better, presenting compelling evidence for continuity into the fifth century. This contrasts with the stark absence of evidence for continued use of the walled area. This suggests that whilst the town was now avoided, Rome’s abdication of urban political authority within the city wasn’t accompanied by a wider breakdown of order—at least, not in the short term. The post-Roman landscape that emerged in the fifth century had no need for an urban community, but elements of the late antique topography survived to reassert themselves when new political arrangements of the late Saxon period required the recreation of a port and bridge on the Thames (Chapter 30).
According to this highly compressed narrative, not only was London twice destroyed in war but it was also twice diminished by the reverberating dislocations of plague. The restoration of the town after these events owed more to the political will of the Roman government than to any innate local resilience. London thrived at times of military campaigns, such as those launched to add lustre to the political claims of new dynasts. Reconstruction also came swiftly after revolt and destruction, witnessing the decisive reaffirmation of Roman authority. The reaction to other kinds of setback was usually slower, and lengthy periods of contraction and neglect may have preceded later restoration. These exercises of urban renewal undertaken in later antiquity, coinciding with periods of relatively strong government, are likely to have relied on new waves of sponsored immigration and were marked by the building and embellishment of the city walls. These set the promise of Roman security in concrete. These promises eventually failed, but elaborated an idea of place that could be remade into the London of today.
These, then, are the perspectives and arguments brought to this study. It is essentially a work of economic and political history described from archaeological evidence. An equally important purpose, however, is to draw attention to the wealth of information obtained from fieldwork in London in the hope that this will encourage its more ambitious use. This has been the goal of antiquarian and archaeological research stretching back over many centuries. Indeed, much longer has been spent in the study of Roman London than was ever spent in its living.