17

London at work

At the port

London was an exceptionally busy city in the late first century, thriving on opportunities brought to the banks of the Thames by its port. This made it home to an important financial and business community attending the needs of imperial expansion, whose activities are documented in writing tablets recovered from waterlogged contexts along the Walbrook valley. These preserve numerous business contracts and declarations formalized by literate lawyers and scribes, introducing us to people such as the merchant Optatus (optato neg.) to whom one such letter was addressed. ¹ About half of the texts whose subject matter is known referred to loans or debts. ² This credit lubricated commerce, and was critical to the operations of the army and administration. Property management was another topic of concern: in ad 64 the slave Florentinus wrote on his master’s instruction that he had received payments, probably rent, in respect of a farm. ³ In another letter Rufus, son of Callisunus, sent greetings to Epillicus and all his messmates asking him to ‘turn that girl into cash’. ⁴ This seems to be an instruction to a business or estate: was a debtor to be pressed or a slave girl sold?

Others communications were concerned with issues of transport and haulage. ⁵ London’s main business was shipping. Boats arriving on the rising tide would have been assessed for customs duties before being assigned a berth, whence cargoes could be disembarked into warehouses and waiting transports. ⁶ Many shipments required multiple handling. Larger boats would have moored in the river channel and been serviced by smaller rivercraft shuttling back and forth to riverside quays. Barges and smaller vessels beached on the foreshore, crowding the quayside. At their greatest extent the quays extended for more than 1 kilometres along the north bank of the river, providing space for at last two dozen berths for broadside-on mooring. ⁷ Jetties and Mediterranean style perpendicular mooring might have added significant capacity. Facilities on the south-bank probably catered for a similar scale of use if more irregularly organized. Heavy loads of amphorae, barrels, crates, bales, and sacks were manhandled from the waterside into stores, aided by cranes and pulleys such as one set over an early third-century base at Billingsgate. ⁸ Some goods were moved directly to the forum, where the enclosed piazza and surrounding offices formed a controlled handling point suitable for dividing shipments into new consignments for onward transport by ox-drawn cart and pack animals. We can picture an administrative and transportation hub, involving a community of public officials, negotiatores, bankers, warehouse agents, porters, and hauliers. Other handling points flanked the city gates, where goods arriving by road could be taxed, drovers could find paddocks for their livestock, and waggons might load and unload without entering the narrow city streets.

London’s harbour needed manpower. The city is estimated to have grown to be home to some 19,000–32,000 people by the second century, making it considerably larger than Pompeii and a match for Rome’s port at Ostia. ⁹ At its busiest the great harbour of Rome might have employed some 3,000 labourers. London had only a fraction of the urban population to provide for, but was the principal port of supply for a large provincial garrison. Dozens of boats needed offloading and reloading daily in busy summers, commanding the services of hundreds of labourers. Sailing schedules generated peaks and troughs of employment for bargemen, stevedores, porters, and hauliers. ¹⁰ A close season was probably observed by most shippers. According to Vegetius, writing in late antiquity, safe sailing was only possible between 27 May and 14 September, with outside limits from 10 March to 10 November. ¹¹ London’s port must have hibernated through the winter, when road haulage also became increasingly difficult. Even in fair weather, shorter days reduced the distances that could be covered and fodder became scarce. Since the oxen that transported heavy loads were tilling fields from late March into May, most traffic travelled in the height of summer with an autumn rush after harvest. The November deadline for the haulage contract of ad 62 on the short route from Verulamium to London was just such a late season transaction. Similar difficulties in transporting supplies and finding fodder interrupted military campaigns, and the army normally retired to winter quarters from November to February. ¹² These seasonal considerations combined to present high levels of labour demand from spring to autumn, interrupted by slack winters of underemployment.

The construction industry

Building sites were also busiest in summer. Again the availability of traction and daylight were important considerations, and earth-built and concrete walls set best in summertime. ¹³ Janet DeLaine has estimated that between 3 and 6 per cent of the population of Rome and Ostia worked in the building industry, keeping thousands of workers employed. ¹⁴ A similar proportion seems credible for London during its expansion, implying the existence of a construction workforce several hundred strong.

Most of London’s first houses were timber-framed structures, employing wattle-and-daub and air-dried mudbrick infill between timber uprights, set beneath thatch, plank and shingle roofs. ¹⁵ Many buildings lasted only 5–10 years before replacement. This involved levelling-off redundant brickearth components to make building platforms for new construction, the repeated frequency of which contributed to the build-up of London’s Roman stratigraphy. Brickearth and gravel were quarried locally, leaving a pockmarked landscape of redundant quarries backfilled with rubbish and earth. Access to suitable quarries diminished as the built-up area expanded, and by end of the first century ad earth walls were often built with material recovered from earlier constructions.

Timber was imported from coppiced woodlands around the city. Trees would have been selected for felling in the autumn, cut down and converted into logs in the bare winter, before river transport to London in the spring. This established a stock for summer building. The demands of larger engineering works required a dedicated procurement chain, with timber felled to order and transported direct to construction sites, but routine house-building probably relied on recycled timber supplemented by purchases from lumber-yards. Timber merchants would have gravitated to waterfront sites, but avoided the crowded harbour. This suggests that sites in Southwark, and perhaps at the mouth of the Fleet, would have been preferred.

Town-based carpentry involved the use of regular oak timbers, squared with axes and planks or sawn on trestles to standard sizes. Cross-cut and rip-saws were widely used, as were elaborate joints and iron nails. ¹⁶ Many early houses were built from pre-fabricated timber-frames with vertical studs rising from horizontal ground sills to wall plates. A distinctive type of wattle and daub was commonly used as infill between studs and posts, formed from horizontal cross-staves that dropped into slots cut into the uprights, through which vertical roundwood elements were woven. This was then covered with clay daub, sometimes sheathed in timber or keyed for plaster by roller-stamping. This technique had been employed on sites along the Rhine frontier before it came to London. More substantial structures employed solid earth-walls, also following construction technologies introduced to Britain by the conquest. ¹⁷ Their design drew on a range of specialist trades: plasterers and painters to decorate the walls, mosaicists and stonemasons to lay marble floors and wall veneers, and heating engineers to design and install hypocausts.

The labour market

London relied on seasonal labour. There was a reduced need for dock-workers, hauliers, and construction workers in winter, and the cyclical nature of these activities made it impractical to maintain a permanent workforce for such purposes alone. It has been suggested that peaks in demand for unskilled menial labour in ancient Rome were met by a combination of urban poor and seasonal immigration from the countryside. ¹⁸ Slaves were better suited to activities offering steady employment since it was uneconomical for their owners to hire them out for part of the year only. ¹⁹ London’s urban poor would have struggled to make ends meet if left idle in the depths of winter, unless supported by a corn dole. Seasonal immigration from the countryside offered greater flexibility and required less in the way of state intervention, but is unlikely to have been viable during London’s earlier decades since the countryside around London wasn’t densely populated. One would also expect to see greater evidence for economic integration between town and country if rural labourers had regularly spent part of the year in town as hired hands.

London’s major construction projects, and the haulage needs of important supply campaigns, might instead have depended on directed labour. There were several ways in which the provincial administration could command manpower at times of need. The army was sometimes used for civilian construction, as attested on inscriptions from various corners of the Roman world. At Vindolanda, soldiers were detailed to a range of building and craft activities including shoemaking, bathhouse construction, and fetching wood and water. ²⁰ At times when London was garrisoned soldiers would have been available for such tasks, but this wasn’t routinely sustainable. Larger numbers of soldiers were more likely to appear on the streets of London at the end of summer campaigns, swelling the city’s population just as the sailing and construction seasons were ending.

Corvée labour might have been mobilized to assist in building public infrastructure. Roman municipal authorities were able to draw on some days’ compulsory labour each year along with draught animals for public building projects. ²¹ Such impositions could have been placed on London’s urban populace and surrounding communities. Labour could also be obtained from those condemned to public work, and military campaigns would have generated a ready supply of forced labour through London’s slave markets. The contribution that slave labour made to road haulage is hinted at by an ink-leaf tablet found discarded in a first-century well at Temple House in Queen Victoria Street in 1959. ²² This was sent to London (Londinii) from someone probably in Rochester (Durobrivae) about a boy, perhaps a slave, who had run away with a waggon. London’s circumstances were such that conscripted and slave labour may have contributed more of the necessary manpower than was feasible in cities further from the frontier.

The working year

London needed oxen for haulage, whose availability would have followed the agricultural cycle. In medieval England, spring ploughing started around 25 March (Lady Day), continuing through April into early May. June was occupied by haymaking, and London’s enormous demand for fodder would have drawn on extensive pastures in its environs. July and August were quieter months, making this the best time of year for beasts of burden to be redeployed onto the city streets. Tile and pottery kilns were also most productive in drier weather. ²³ Summer kilns drew on fuel generated by forestry operations, taking advantage of surplus transport capacity when logging was complete. Salt working in the estuary was also best undertaken in the summer. Plant remains associated with the Roman salterns at Stanford Wharf in Essex are consistent with summer and early autumn gathering of saltmarsh plants to provide fuel and create brine. ²⁴ Harvesting occupied rural labour from August into September, following which the grain was threshed and the share due in rent and tax could be collected and transported before autumn sowing. ²⁵ Once the harvest was gathered, processed, and moved to winter storage, the pace of life could slow. Old and surplus livestock could be slaughtered and salted in November, along with the products of autumn fishing and hunting. This was also the season for marking out trees for felling in managed woodlands. Between late November and early March there was little outdoor work, and this became a time for making and mending. In London, this would have entailed a massive redirection of effort from outdoor labour into workshop production.

The winter months would have seen a significant change in the social composition of the city as the army returned to the comfort of winter quarters, and the governor and his entourage to their administrative base. Whilst the governor would have toured the cities and forts under his authority, London was the most important theatre for political activity. Documents from Vindolanda and London suggest that many soldiers attached to the governor’s administration were based in London by the end of the first century. ²⁶ It was here that representatives of provincial communities could petition the governor, where important trials took place, and business affairs were best organized. Cameron Hawkins has drawn a telling parallel with the winter ‘season’ of seventeenth-century London, when court and parliament took residence. ²⁷ The rich and powerful brought large retinues in their wake, and town houses reopened after summer closure. One of the largest sectors of employment would have been domestic service. A seasonal influx of staff attending the wealthy officer classes joined the more permanently established households of the procurator and his Caesariani responsible for managing the annona, taxation, and imperial property. Places of entertainment and trade were busied by increased demand.

Craft production concentrated into the winter months when patrons commissioned specialist and luxury items. Much industrial production, manufacture and repair, worked to spring deadlines as stock was readied for construction, shipping and campaigning seasons. This heightened seasonal demand coincided with the easier availability of labour between November and March. Whilst skilled artisan proprietors could have staggered work through the year, using slack periods to build inventories, seasonal product markets would have limited the demand for permanent labour and encouraged manufacturers to recruit assistance on a short-term basis only. Here too we lack evidence on the relative importance of free and servile labour within London’s workshops, although the common use of the Roman tria nomina in manufacturers’ stamps indicates that proprietors were often citizens. ²⁸ London relied on skills unknown in Britain before the conquest, and many craftsmen are identifiably immigrants. Some may have arrived speculatively but it is likely that most drew on existing contacts, following powerful patrons to ready commissions. If so, many of London’s first professional craftsmen would have already been known to the contractors and officials that served the Roman provincial government, sharing in a common background. Slaves would have formed a significant proportion of the workforce, given their ready availability and the low status of wage employment. Slaves could develop skills in winter employment within their owner’s shops and workshops, and be hired out to help in summer porterage. Skilled slaves also ran and managed the imperial household and other private estates, occupying some of the most senior positions in the administration (below p. 222).

Shops and workshops

Urban industry and city marketplaces converted perishable rural surplus obtained in rent and tax into coin and thence bullion. London’s internal economy developed around transactions which established the conditions for market specialization. Private shops and workshops were a necessary part of this economic landscape, serving both urban consumers and military demand (Fig. 17.1). Craftsmen and shopkeepers consequently formed a significant presence within the city, and there is sufficient evidence of specialization to suggest that London easily matched the 85 different occupations attested at Pompeii. ²⁹

Fig. 17.1 Industry and production in London at the beginning of the second century: the urban layout is that of the later Hadrianic period, but some of the industrial activities belong to slightly earlier and later phases. Drawn by Justin Russell.

London’s markets used the standard weights and measures promoted by Rome as part of the apparatus of regulatory control. Unsurprisingly, more weighing instruments have been found in London than any other Romano-British site. ³⁰ These included equal balances, steelyards and dual balances. Many of the weights can be related to specific Roman units of measurement, such as the uncia (ounce) and libra (pound). This instrumentation indicates that the weighing out of small amounts mattered more in London than elsewhere in Britain, in a marketplace where high-value commodities were commonly exchanged. Rulers, marked using the standard Roman foot or pes monetalis, have also been found. ³¹ There is evidence for regulation of property divisions, and detailed records allowed the recreation of property boundaries after fires. ³²

Most production took place in small workshops from which finished goods were sold, each probably only employing a small number of people. ³³ Two main types can be identified. Buildings around the forum and behind the waterfront presented rows of small-scale open-fronted units used as stores, factories, and shops, but which may have included living space in mezzanine or upper floors. These were similar to the premises described as tabernae in other Roman cities, and likely to have been designed as rental units. ³⁴ Other workshops were located within large rectangular buildings known as strip-buildings built alongside the main roads into town with their gable-end against the street. ³⁵ The best preserved examples were excavated at Newgate Street in 1977–8 (Fig. 17.2). ³⁶ These earth and timber walled buildings were some 8–9 metres wide by 20–8 metres long, largely given over to workshops and stores, with smaller residential quarters to the rear. By the end of the first century, the living quarters in some of these buildings were decorated with painted walls and concrete floors. Later the reception rooms set to the rear of strip buildings at One Poultry were furnished with costly mosaic pavements and hypocaust floors suggesting that patrons who lived behind their shops accumulated sufficient wealth to invest in conspicuous social display. ³⁷ London’s prosperous workshop owners saw no need to distance themselves from the source of their wealth: there was no shame to business success.

Fig. 17.2 The early second-century ‘strip buildings’ at Newgate Street (GPO75: after Perring and Roskams 1991). Drawn by Justin Russell.

Retailing commanded the better locations at One Poultry, where a Neronian shop sold luxuries for fine dining and another may have been a tavern (above p. 80). ³⁸ The urban retailing of ceramics may have been largely restricted to fine wares, using a similar distribution network to other imported luxuries. ³⁹ London’s shops and workshops addressed the needs of the urban community, but also served a passing trade who used the big city to find things difficult to obtain elsewhere. One of the accounts found at Vindolanda lists purchases made in London and brought to Hadrian’s Wall by one Adiutor. ⁴⁰ This included a set of kitchen bowls along with mustard-seed, anise, caraway and thyme. This order would have been filled in a shop of the sort found at One Poultry. There is little to suggest, however, that the urban marketplace attracted many customers from the surrounding countryside: few of the goods made and sold here found their way onto the rural sites excavated within the region. ⁴¹

A row of narrow single storey buildings, separated by narrow alleyways, was squeezed behind the early forum (Fig. 17.3). ⁴² Some contained rows of near-identical rooms, each about 4 metres square, containing a small fixed fireplace. Similar rooms were set behind a workshop at Newgate Street consisting of a row of three slightly smaller near square rooms, each with a fireplace against one wall. ⁴³ These were possibly one-roomed lodgings or perhaps brothels. ⁴⁴

Fig. 17.3 The early second-century ‘strip buildings’ at Leadenhall Court (LCT94: after Milne and Wardle 1993). Drawn by Justin Russell.

Shipbuilding

London’s port was served by a merchant fleet, attracting communities of sailors and fishermen, and contributing to the development of a local ship-building industry. The Roman fleet (Classis Britannica) might also have played a role in London’s supply during some campaigns. Ships were built in large numbers on such occasions, as when Germanicus’ ordered the construction of a fleet of 1000 ships on the Rhine, but most were privately built and owned. ⁴⁵ The hulks of Roman ships found along the Thames show that some were locally made. A large flat-bottomed lighter submerged in a channel near Guy’s hospital must have been built on the river since it would not have survived a sea voyage, whilst timbers used in a barge found near Blackfriars bridge present a dendrochronological profile showing them to have grown nearby. ⁴⁶ A distinct Romano-Celtic ship-building tradition can be recognized from this evidence, borrowing from coastal regions of Belgic Gaul where skills and capacity were long established. ⁴⁷

The Thames was flanked by tidal creeks where shipyards could be established, and the city provided the necessary concentration of skilled craftsmen. Timber and iron were locally available, and the Roman reintroduction of flax cultivation to the Thames valley may have been encouraged by a demand for linen to make sails. ⁴⁸ The ship-building industry was the subject of a text preserved on a writing tablet found close to the Walbrook at Lothbury in 1927. ⁴⁹ This included references to sales from a shop or workshop (vendidisse ex taberna sua), shipbuilding (navem faciendam), and the making of a tiller or rudder (clavi faciendi), although gaps in the document leave us uncertain as to the nature of the transaction.

The hulls of local ships were made from overlapping planking secured to frames by nails. Peter Marsden has calculated that the Blackfriars barge, built with timbers felled in the early or middle part of the second century, used 1,500 massive nails containing over half a tonne of iron. Iron was also needed for ship’s anchors and chains. These uses explain why the Roman fleet was involved in Wealden iron production (p. 185). The Flavian expansion of ironworking was a likely consequence of escalating military and naval demand, allied to the emphasis on local procurement. We have already noted that Wealden ironworking areas were connected to London by roads converging on Southwark. Iron transported along these roads had various uses, but the strategic importance of ship-building may have encouraged the military investment in the transport infrastructure. There are topographic grounds for believing that London’s important shipyards lay south of the river. The north-bank was largely taken up by the harbour and too cramped for boatyards. ⁵⁰ Low-lying Southwark was better suited, and the point of entry for both Wealden iron and timber rafted down-river from Surrey and Hampshire. Most of the wrought iron arrived in a semi-forced condition in need of further working. Much of this took place beside the river at the western end of Southwark’s northern island where evidence of iron-working and copper-alloy working has been recovered from over 60 separate production sites across a four-hectare area. ⁵¹ Some small scale iron-working started soon after the conquest, indicated by hammerscale in the upper fills of the Claudian ditch at Park Street. Activity increased massively in the early Flavian period, following the construction of the roads that brought Wealden iron to London. Initially the iron working was an open-air activity, but sites were subsequently protected by timber shelters. Many dozens of clay-lined hearths were used for smithing iron, casting copper alloy, and smelting ore fuelled chiefly with oak charcoal. ⁵² The products of this industry are thought to include nails, tools and other fittings. This production would have been stimulated by London’s shipyards but London’s road hauliers would have created a parallel demand for wheelwrights and wainwrights working in timber and iron at similar locations.

Other industry

Several of London’s early workshops made and repaired military equipment and armour (above p. 76). Some items were destined for military consumers elsewhere in Britain, such as the purchases described in letters at Vindolanda. ⁵³ Evidence for casting and working small copper alloy items comes in the form of crucibles, moulds and slag in workshops along the roads into town at Newgate Street and Borough High Street. ⁵⁴ Many of the things made here were dress accessories, such as brooches, used to define social and official standing. ⁵⁵ The finds at Borough High Street also included the remains of an investment mould likely to have been used to make a larger vessel or statue. ⁵⁶

Blacksmiths occupied roadside locations on the edges of town. ⁵⁷ These are recognized from concentrations of hammerscale: the iron flakes generated by beating hot metal on an anvil. The slightly built and well-ventilated buildings where forges were located also contained hearths, rake-out debris, and iron slag. One stood alongside the main approach road to London Bridge in Southwark before the Boudican revolt. ⁵⁸ Blacksmithing resumed nearby after the revolt and continued into the early second century in a trade sustained over several generations. Blacksmiths made and maintained road vehicles, armour and cavalry gear, and tools for London’s craftsmen. ⁵⁹ The fashioning of iron is magical, and small shrines and votive deposits are commonly associated with metalworking. ⁶⁰ A timber-lined well behind the workshop contained a ‘smith urn’ depicting a smith’s hammer, anvil and tongs, perhaps placed here as a ritual closure deposit propitiating the smith god Vulcan. ⁶¹ The remains of about twenty dogs found in this well and adjacent pits contributed to protective ritual: Carrie Cowan and Angela Wardle have drawn attention to the chthonic symbolism attributed to dogs and their association with the ‘mallet god’ Sucellus, identified with Dis Pater the patron of coopers and other craftsmen. At Bucklersbury House, in the Walbrook valley, the charred remains of an arcaded wooden screen that may have formed a small domestic shrine associated with early second-century ironworking debris. ⁶²

London has produced an impressive range of iron tools, especially along the Walbrook where they probably entered the ground as votive items alongside rubbish dumped in land reclamation. ⁶³ They witness a range of new crafts and industries, including woodworking (chisels, gouges, awls), metalworking (tongs, punches, hammers, an anvil, a furnace bar), timber and masonry construction (plasterers’ tools, trowels), garden horticulture, tanning, and leatherworking. Some served the needs of distinct professional trades such as coopers, sawyers, joiners, metalworkers, vessel manufacturers, tanners, and shoemakers. Specialist tools simplified repetitive tasks: including the planes and rip saws used in woodwork, dies used in metalwork, and hole punches used in leatherwork. ⁶⁴ This made it easier for craftsmen to standardize the manufacture of decorative items and achieve a degree of mass production. Dies and stamps suggest that most were controlled by private citizens, invariably men.

Several iron knives were locally made, including a group stamped by the cutler Basilius. ⁶⁵ Lead and tin were used both separately and in combination (as pewter) for making small implements such as knives, spoons, toilet implements, tablewares, cooking vessels, furniture fittings, horse fittings, armour, and statuettes. ⁶⁶ A group of seventeen decorated spoons cast in lead-tin alloy found along the London waterfront were probably of London manufacture. ⁶⁷ These probably date to the early second century and were decorated with Bacchic motifs of canthari, parrots or doves, and fish. Stone moulds used for making lead-alloy bowls have been found at Dominant House in Queen Victoria Street and Cannon Street station. ⁶⁸ The working of precious metals is represented by the discovery of parts of crucibles used for refining gold, sealed by clay stamps showing lions and boars, in late Flavian contexts at Suffolk Lane. ⁶⁹ The processes included gold melting, cupellation and parting: possibly from melting down late Iron Age coin or jewellery for refashioning into new wrought-gold objects. Crucibles used in gold and silver working have been found in St Thomas Street in Southwark and the upper Walbrook valley, and another containing liquid mercury from 62–4 Cornhill was perhaps used in soldering decorative metalwork. ⁷⁰

Leather goods included tents, body-armour, jackets, breeches, sacks, protective covers, saddles, shield coverings, harnesses, and shoes. ⁷¹ At the time of the conquest these were imported, but discarded waste shows that production started in London by the end of the first century. Rome introduced sophisticated new leatherworking practices based on vegetable-based tanning. ⁷² Hides were steeped in water with large quantities of oak bark, abundantly available as a by-product of construction and ship-building. The need for a ready water supply drew London’s tanners into the upper Walbrook valley and parts of Southwark, and numerous large wood-lined tanks and channels were associated with the Hadrianic redevelopment of the upper Walbrook valley. ⁷³ Although no tanning pits have been identified, waste known as crust leather from Drapers’ Gardens shows that post-tanning processing took place nearby. Hundreds of leather fragments have been found on adjacent sites, along with a pegged-out skin. Fragments of tent panels found in earlier Roman contexts in London show that these were predominantly made from goat-skin, although waste from New Fresh Wharf witness the third-century use of calf-skin. ⁷⁴ Some leather waste carried identifying letters and numerals incised into the borders of the hides before tanning. Where names are found these are generally in the tria nomina form, and it is likely that tanning was undertaken by private contractors. Leather-working, as opposed to tanning, is represented by both waste materials and specialist punches and awls used in the workshops. ⁷⁵ Incomplete shoes, leather pieces, and cobblers’ tools have been found at 60 London Wall and a second-century building at Drapers’ Gardens is thought to have been used by a shoemaker. ⁷⁶ Some shoes may have been marked with size indicators, with a size ‘X’ found at Billingsgate Buildings, a size ‘VIII’ from Angel Court, and a size ‘XII’ from the Bank of England.

Some of London’s workshops were involved in textile manufacture. Wooden and bone spindles and spindle-whorls are common finds, but it is difficult to distinguish between household and factory production. The two-beam vertical loom favoured by weavers leaves little archaeological trace, leaving us unable to identify centres of production. ⁷⁷ A bone-working assemblage found at Cross Keys Court included cattle scapulae cut to remove flat plates in order to make triangular weaving tablets and cutting shears have been recovered from Walbrook deposits. ⁷⁸ London is likely to have housed professional weavers, dyers, fullers, woolcombers, and sellers of dyed and washed wool and hackled flax. ⁷⁹ The army required large quantities of cloth and there were advantages to developing a textile industry at this supply hub, drawing on wool procured from sheep-farming within the region.

One of the writing tablets found at the Bloomberg headquarters was addressed to Junius the Cooper (Iunio cupario) opposite the house of Catullus. ⁸⁰ Another may have been addressed to Tertius the brewer, whom Roger Tomlin identifies as the same individual known from a writing tablet found at Carlisle. The name Tertius was also scored on a wooden barrel-head found in a well dated ad 63–4 at Blossom’s Inn. ⁸¹ Barrel-making involved a high level of professional specialization, and examples of a specialist cooper’s saw, the croze, have also been found in London. ⁸² This expertise allowed Tertius to establish a successful business supplying barrels of beer the length of Britain.

London’s waterfront workshops housed another highly specialized type of woodworking: the manufacture of writing tablets used to document business transactions. Wooden shavings found at Pudding Lane, in contexts dated c. ad 80, came from the recycling of the silver fir wine barrels used to import wine. ⁸³ The refashioning of these barrel staves involved paring them down to form facing rectangular leaves, each recessed and filled with blackened bees-wax (a by-product of local apiculture) to take the incised text.

Massive dumps of oyster shells near London Bridge suggests that a pickling or salting industry was located on the waterfront. ⁸⁴ This might account for a concentration of north Kent shelly-ware storage vessels in this area, bringing salt or salted goods from Kentish salterns. A late Roman drain near the waterfront contained thousands of small bones from young herring and sprat, representing a catch of ‘whitebait’ from the estuary perhaps being converted into fish sauce nearby. ⁸⁵ Livestock entering town was directed towards specialist butchers and markets, identified by waste involving head and foot parts and secondary products. ⁸⁶ The carcasses left after hides and meat had been removed supported several craft industries. Bone, antler and horn were used to craft items such as hairpins, combs, dice, handles, drinking vessels and knife handles. ⁸⁷ Assemblages of smashed bone fragments may have been boiled to extract grease for treating horse harness and equipment (above p. 80). These may be a characteristic of sites with military connections, and have been noted on the borders of the second-century district in the upper Walbrook valley where leatherworking was common. ⁸⁸

The productive periphery

Noxious industries, particularly those with fuel-hungry kilns, were generally located on the borders of town. At least twenty-one different glass-making sites have been identified from manufacturing waste. Their products included blown-glass wide-mouthed cups and containers (for water, wine, oil, and ointments), window-glass (used in bathhouses), glass tesserae, and stirring rods. London’s earliest known glass-blower set up business in the 60s or 70s in a waterfront unit at Regis House (p. 101). By the end of the century these operations had ceased, but new kilns were found on the western boundary of the city at Gateway House and Bow Bells House. ⁸⁹ Others were located on the town’s eastern borders, represented by glass-working waste and fragments of a glass furnace in late first- or early second-century rubbish pits at Plantation Place and Colchester House. ⁹⁰ Parts of furnace lining, pot metal, droplets, cuttings and waste were found beneath the rampart of the city wall at the Tower, suggesting the establishment of another second-century glass-blowing workshop in this area. ⁹¹

Glass-makers subsequently established kilns in the upper Walbrook valley on the northern margins of town, following Hadrianic marsh reclamation. Parts of a tank furnace were found near Moorgate, and a 50 kilogramme dump of glass cullet was recovered at Guildhall Yard. ⁹² Finds at 35 Basinghall Street, south east of the amphitheatre, derived from two phases of second-century glass-working that ended with the catastrophic failure of an ageing furnace. ⁹³ The glassmakers concentrated on basic tablewares and containers including bottles. Finds included 70 kilos of broken vessel glass and production waste, including tank metal and the moils left over from glass blowing, and droplets and threads used to test viscosity. As with London’s other glass making, this was ‘secondary’ production using glass imported in raw blocks, and broken glass collected for re-cycling (cullet). Compositional analysis shows that the raw glass had been imported from the eastern Mediterranean in three separate batches. It seems that the glass-blowers were seasonal craftsmen, returning to the site and starting production afresh, hence drawing on fresh imports of raw-materials when setting-up rather than using cullet accumulated from earlier operations.

Eight glass-making kilns, one much repaired, were also located on the banks of the Fleet south of the road to Newgate. ⁹⁴ These operated from the Hadrianic period until the early third century. This evidence combines to suggest that skilled glass-blowers with access to imported technologies and materials had established short-term furnaces in under-developed areas on London’s margins. This was a seasonal activity, with the returning glass-blowers often relocating in the face of competition from other forms of land-use. The scale of production increased considerably in the second century, especially in the Hadrianic period when London’s industrial production was at its height.

Pottery and tile kilns were also established on the western boundaries of the city, largely meeting local demand. The first were established before the Boudican revolt producing flagons and table wares. After the revolt several were set behind ribbon development along the main road approaching London from the west. These included updraught kilns with perforated floors uncovered in rebuilding St Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire. Another was found in the Paternoster development south-east of the Cathedral in 1961; this was also of the updraught design with pottery dated to the late first to the early second century. ⁹⁵ This pottery production may also have been largely seasonal. Early second-century kilns producing wheel-thrown whitewares were found at Northgate House in the upper Walbrook valley. ⁹⁶ Two large circular kilns were set within clay-lined pits given solid floors of sun-dried bricks pierced by circular vents. They were fuelled by oak from tree-tops, perhaps the by-product of converting trees to timber. The potters used locally sourced London clay and clay imported from the Reading beds to make oxidized wares, reduced London ware, and mica dusted, marbled and eggshell finewares identical to Verulamium region products. Specialist products included mortaria (mixing bowls), lamps, small amphorae, lids, bowls, and dishes. ⁹⁷ The evidence suggests that potters from workshops at Brockley Hill, close to Verulamium, had also opened kilns in London in the early second century. Stamps identify the potters Lucius, Valentinus, and Maximus. A timber structure next to the kilns is thought to be the workshop, where a stock of unused Gaulish Samian suggest that pottery was sold.

Market gardens bordered the town, supplying perishable produce to urban consumers and perhaps pioneering the cultivation of exotic species. The inventory of tools recovered from London includes a wider range of gardening implements than anywhere else in Roman Britain, and London’s pottery assemblages include planting pots with drainage holes made in Kentish Eccles ware suggesting that that saplings were sourced from nurseries in this area. ⁹⁸ Cultivation soils and bedding trenches occupied a roadside plot left vacant after the Boudican revolt at 1–7 Whittington Avenue, and field systems, stock enclosures, and animal byres have been identified on the borders of town. ⁹⁹