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Afterword

Describing a city of empire

This book has drawn on a wealth of new information to trace the early history of one of the world’s most consequential cities. The detail with which we can do so is a testament to the achievements of rescue archaeology. Although it presents many new conclusions, the account is in many respects a conventional one. A tightly framed historical narrative is an effective way of giving shape to the evidence and opening paths to new understandings.

We now have a substantial body of evidence to suggest that London grew on the back of the strategic choices made by emperors and their representatives. The new Roman city was brought into being to command the Thames crossing, serving as a gateway emporium to freshly conquered territories. It was then developed as the leading site for Roman rule in Britain, benefitting from significant injections of resources at times of military need and ambition. This exercise of power was political, and the city’s architectural development consequently affords glimpses into the policies of particular regimes, adding important new detail to aspects of Roman history.

The view obtained from the banks of the Thames is of an imperial territory that was more directly managed than much recent scholarship has assumed. Since London was a place of Roman invention, unmoored from the interests of local land-owning aristocracies, it presents several unusual characteristics when viewed alongside the cities of the Roman Mediterranean. It was a supply-base for military campaigns, a market where the authorities turned conquest to profit, and a hive of makers and sellers serving new communities formed around provincial government. These colonial purposes made London resolutely alien, binding it to an administrative establishment drawn from the emperor’s household and the governor’s military forces. It was crowded with money-lenders, merchants, shippers, and tradesmen: carpet-baggers whose interests were shaped by fealty to an officer-class with roots in Gaul and Germany. The dominating presence of these agents of Rome curtailed opportunities for the development of locally based patronage networks. The political influence of the pre-conquest population in the Thames basin may have been further stunted by a preponderance of confiscated borderlands, drawn into estates owned from afar and managed through London-based agents and agencies.

The most important features of the early city were its bridge and port, the presence of which generated an attendant network of arterial roads designed for the convoys of waggons destined for the forts and cities of the interior. London’s quays channelled massive flows of campaign supplies and provisions: grain, oil, leather, meat, clothing, wine, and exotic luxuries. The staples marshalled to feed the advancing army became a flow of annonary goods that fed the city and underwrote London’s urban economy. After Flavian reform, this may have allowed sponsored distributions of bread baked from flour ground in technologically advanced watermills, supporting a large urban population of hauliers, builders, and makers. For the first century of its existence, London thrived on the business channelled through its docks and warehouses, and was the beneficiary of administrations seeking to advance their political cause through British conquest.

The growing city gained its shape and character through a series of planned additions. Several phases of urban expansion can be traced, each generating new capacity. The creation of new districts and topographies brought new people to London, whose presence was layered onto earlier landscapes. Once the business of supply was firmly in hand, settlement was probably encouraged by land grants in newly ordered quarters of town. It was certainly underpinned by the necessary luxuries of social bathing and lavish dinner parties, which lubricated patronage networks that ultimately relied on the emperors direct representatives in the province: the governor and procurator. Reforms under Vespasian built on London’s role as a supply-base, probably involving stronger controls over regional production and taxation and incorporating new ideas about the performative display of imperial power. The amphitheatre was the quintessential symbol of this new regime and it is significant that other forms of civic architecture were slower to arrive, some perhaps delayed until Rome considered the conquest of Britain complete later in the century.

There is much to admire about the way in which the Roman engineers exploited the site. Road building and town planning chased the curve of the land and fixed new landscapes against ancient topographies. The choice of site, and the craft of its design, generated an enduring cityscape. Reuse and recycling, of places and materials, became a pragmatic choice but knowingly anchored London within its inherited landscape. This was a place where mundane supernatural forces were recognized and accommodated through constant apotropaic appeasement, whilst also yoked firmly to the divine power of Rome and its emperors.

London’s engineering served various institutions of government, and the social needs of the communities who set their fortunes to this frontier city. We are offered only passing glimpses of the world of associations through which these Londoners gained social and political agency. The written record is inevitably dominated by mention of military and political office but also identifies local administrations, cult affiliations, trade associations, professions, and family relations. In the absence of any local elite society to co-opt, political control and architectural patronage depended on government officials rather than civilian association, generating an unusual urban society that gave birth to a particular urban form.

Tracing exogenous shock

London’s dependency on the flows of people and goods that served Rome’s colonial project made it particularly vulnerable. This can be seen in the way that two different types of exogenous shock—war and plague—find reflection in the archaeological record. One of the themes to emerge from this study is how differently these threats may have represented themselves, and how differently responses were framed. We know most about London’s destruction in the Boudican revolt, which is the only one of these events for which we have incontrovertible evidence. Response to London’s violent destruction was swift and decisive, and within a couple of years the city was largely restored by military engineering. A detritus of body-parts on the city borders offers a stark reminder of the brutal means by which Rome imposed its peace. The archaeology of the Hadrianic fire, and the pattern of ensuing military engineering, echoed the Boudican destruction so closely that it can also be read as evidence of revolt and response. Rome’s answer to military setback was to throw overwhelming resources into the uncompromising reassertion of control. In this regard the building and rebuilding of London was both symbol and product of the Roman peace, in a landscape where urban civilization was a tool of domination and the language of the dominant. The commerce enabled by London’s port and financial institutions met the needs of supply-chain management, and for those in the city’s orbit the benefits of economic growth would have been offset by the attendant impositions of taxes and rents. The fact of London’s repeated destruction, and the defensive character of its later architecture, signals the contested nature of the values that it represented.

Wars are difficult to identify from archaeological evidence without supporting historical testimony, but it is even harder to trace the impact of ancient plagues. We have certain epigraphic evidence, however, that the devastating pandemic of c. ad 165 caused alarm in London. The city suffered a pronounced urban contraction and economic dislocation at exactly the time that this plague swept through the Roman world. We cannot conclusively show that this was not some unusual coincidence, but the arrival of plague provides a coherent explanation for the exceptional changes witnessed in the middle of the second century. We cannot be certain that any Londoner died, but the impacts of plague included both short-term prophylactic measures and long-term social change. Any flight of labour, perhaps embracing the military evacuation of London’s Hadrianic fort, would have had the most serious economic consequences. Full restoration appears to have taken a generation or more, eventually accomplished through the direct intervention of the state in public projects following Severan restoration. This is when London was reinvented and its town walls were built.

Just as the archaeology of the Boudican fire was echoed by that of London’s Hadrianic fire, so the archaeology of London’s Antonine contraction foreshadowed the failure of London’s port in the 250s. The pattern of change is consistent with a further loss of manpower at a time of plague and military instability. Locally it involved the collapse of long-distance supply, a retreat from organized estate production in London’s hinterland, and perhaps a loss of control of the seas around Britain. Once again the city was eventually restored and re-ordered at the prompt of distant emperors, perhaps following a recessionary interval lasting one or two decades. These two episodes of urban retreat, starting c. ad 165 and c. ad 253, present a model of how pandemics might represent themselves in the archaeological record where we have no dead to count. These assumptions need further testing, but if this analysis is correct, then it adds to our understanding of how and why the world of later antiquity came to differ to that of the high empire.

The shocks of these events may have provoked systemic change, inducing the imperial administration to introduce new forms of government. The most conspicuous consequence of change was the reduced flow of annonary goods and redundancy of London’s port. We can question how sustainable the pattern of earlier supply had ever been, as frontiers became fixed and wars of conquest ceased to reward imperial advance.¹ Earlier patterns of importation, especially of goods associated with fine dining, continued—if with significant variation—into the third century. This had perhaps become a case of path dependency, where arrangements developed to support the initial conquest had persisted beyond their utility. Administrations may have been unprepared to confront the political costs of limiting the Mediterranean styles of consumption that defined and rewarded social standing.² These subsidies and inefficiencies could not be sustained in the face of the failures of the middle of the third century. External stochastic shock may have exposed problems and forced change. In sum, these pandemics shook the Roman world from earlier forms of path-dependency developed around the opportunities of imperial expansion, and inspired the invention of the new architectures of control that characterized late antiquity. These, in turn, contributed to the political circumstances that fuelled the later fragmentation of empire.

Resilience, persistence, and failure

Despite the sporadic problems of destruction and depopulation, London showed considerable resilience. War and plague may have provoked tectonic shifts in the way in which London functioned within the Roman world, especially with regard to the organization and role of annona supply, but these were not terminal shocks. Recovery was a political necessity because of London’s administrative role, but the loss of manpower saw a diminished role for London’s port and a concomitant decline of the subsidiary craft production that relied on seasonal labour. Whilst London’s Severan revival was planned around the idea of London as both a capital city and a transportation hub, involving new administrative commands that relied on London’s harbour, this was no longer the case when Roman rule was restored after the fall of the Gallic Empire c. ad 274. New arrangements for the supply of the provincial garrison and command of coastal regions had contributed to a significant economic rebalancing, and the port was not revived.

This allows us to describe a fundamental shift in the character of the archaeology of Roman London, following this mid-third-century turning point. The early city had been an emporium, where new programmes of waterfront construction attended the supply needs of campaigns and annona reform, and were accompanied by investment in roads, quays, and public porticoes. These cyclical building programmes described expansionary high-points in the history of Rome’s involvement in Britain, when London was a confident staging post in imperial advance, backed by immense flows of people and resources. Following the shocks of the second and third centuries, the city was reinvented as a seat of administrative power: a wall-girt enclave of privilege and power. Sporadic imperial interest came to be expressed by additions and improvements to London’s defensive architecture rather than its quays. These too responded to the political strategies of regimes that found reason to engage in British affairs, but drawing on more limited resources, using fewer people within a tighter network of control.

London’s eventual failure at the dawn of the fifth century should not blind us to its impressive record of earlier recovery following catastrophic destruction, population decline, and economic contraction. Its persistent reinvention suggests a degree of urban resilience. The factors that contribute to urban resilience have been much explored in studies of how cities recover from disaster, where social capital—the networks that enable effective community action—is often seen as critically important.³ But we have no grounds for believing that London survived because of its social capital. It was its continued utility to Rome as a place of government that ensured its revival. A parallel can be drawn with sixth-century Antioch, which survived disasters because emperors took a direct interest in its recovery, investing in large-scale reconstruction, repopulating the city after disaster, and maintaining the population through free bread doles.⁴ The measures that sustained Antioch were equally determinant in shaping London’s fortunes. London failed, then, when Rome ceased to find reason to support it. This exposed its lack of the social capital and economic purpose that might otherwise have underwritten urban life. London’s vulnerabilities were a product of its alien identity, shrunken economic role, and dependency on flows of government investment.

During its expansion, Rome found ample resources to deal with adversity: rebuilding promptly after military setbacks and swift to re-impose authority through overwhelming force. This drew on the logistical machinery that London was built to serve. Rome not only marched on its stomach, but wined and dined its servants on unprecedented scale. The consequent traffic, and the need to raise taxes and rents to support government, stimulated economic growth. For those in command this brought many opportunities, but wealth was unevenly distributed and the benefits of city-living remained largely inaccessible to the surrounding countryside. The discoveries in London suggest that repeated shocks to the system reduced Rome’s capacity to mobilize resources. These changes left the imperial systems more vulnerable to lower order threats, and as a consequence the city was reinvented in late antiquity as a defended administrative enclave within a network of such places.

London ceased to exist because Rome failed to maintain authority in Britain, and the city had no other evident reason for being. Its disappearance is unlikely to have been a matter of widespread regret. The rewards of economic growth gained from the Roman investment in productivity were unevenly distributed, offering few material benefits to the wider population.⁵ The Roman administration was otherwise harsh, and the demands of tax and rent unwelcome. Whilst the achievements of Roman London were many, they failed to carry far and advantaged only the privileged few.

This account has chiefly been concerned with understanding the political and economic forces that gave structure to Roman London, building a chronology for changing patterns of investment and supply. This narrative approach, and an overriding concern with imperial strategy, makes this a top-down study concerned more with issues of political structure than those of social agency. Our understanding of how social actors, both individuals and disparate groups, responded to the exercise of Roman imperial power in London is less advanced. There is a wealth of information sitting within meaningful assemblages of rubbish that have been recovered from London’s changing landscape, from which much more can be done to explore the relationship between people and power. These relationships are historically contingent. Ideas and beliefs exist of their time, and are forged in response to experience, circumstance, and opportunity. In this book I have tried to sketch out the more critical strands of change that shaped life in Roman London, in the hope that this will encourage such research, providing an architecture against which new ideas can be tested.