by A. N. Wilson
The chief “industry” of the rest of London is tourism. Millions, with cameras draped around their necks, troop through the Tower, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey each year, spending billions of pounds in all the hotels and restaurants that have sprung up to accommodate their requirements. It is a matter of judgment whether these tourists come to see London’s past, or visit London for other reasons. In any event, now that London has become a tourist center, this very fact has destroyed much of its historic character. The Tower, for example, is no longer really a fortress. Its function is that of a tourist attraction. The tourists make its real history and function seem as ersatz as Disney World.
While these huge changes in the economic climate and composition of London were being effected, two other great changes were also happening. The first, begun by Hitler’s Luftwaffe and gleefully continued by two generations of modernist architects, was the destruction and rebuilding of old London. For the most part, the new buildings that have sprung up, when compared with the magnificence of Manhattan or Chicago, are staggeringly undistinguished. There is hardly a corner of the British capital where such nondescript but at the same time intrusive building has not gone on. The Square Mile of the City has all but been obliterated by it. Look down upon London, as we did at the beginning of this chapter, from Hampstead Heath, and a great splurge of needlessly dreary buildings spreads itself at your feet: hospitals, schools, roads, blocks of flats, everywhere from the Isle of Dogs to Chiswick, from Hampstead to Sydenham—badly executed, badly designed, and ugly, ugly, ugly.
Those who inhabit this place are, some of them, holders of British passports, but increasingly not. In the last ten years London has witnessed the phenomenon of asylum seekers on a scale unrivaled by any other city in the world. Hundreds of thousands of Londoners are now visitors who have arrived, without sanction, from Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Their arrival has been coincident with a colossal increase in crime, and a near crippling of such resources as council-owned housing, hospitals, and schools. There has also been, in the last half century, a huge legal immigration to London by British passport holders from the West Indies, from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Africa, and the Far East.
Philosophers like to debate whether the ax that has had three new handles and seven new heads is the same ax. Some who survey the history of London will decide that, mysteriously, the spirit of London—William Blake’s or Peter Ackroyd’s London, as it were—goes on, whatever huge changes we have described in the economy, the architectural structure, and the demography. Others might think that the London of old has actually died—or at best, gone underground—to be replaced by a confused, overcrowded multinational conurbation which shares the same name but has nothing whatever in common with the London of Nicholas Hawksmoor, Charles Dickens, or Marie Lloyd.
2
NEW TROY OR ROMAN LONDON?
One of the favorites of King Richard II impeached by the Merciless Parliament of 1388 was a former Lord Mayor of London, Sir Nicholas Brembre (or Bramber). The King’s uncle, Gloucester, was determined to prove that Brembre, an old enemy, had done something worthy of death, accusing him of tyrannous conduct during his mayoralty and of threatening behavior during elections. He had, Gloucester alleged, filled the Guildhall with armed men to prevent his opponents on the Corporation coming to vote, uttering the warlike cry of “Tuwez, tuwez!” None of these charges could be made to stick. Brembre had made enemies while Lord Mayor, for example the aldermen he turned out of the Common Council, but he had also made friends among those he appointed to offices (such as his comptroller in the Port of London, Geoffrey Chaucer) and the King, who, under Brembre’s mayoralty, had been lent a much needed four thousand marks.1
Brembre, a grocer who had been hugely enriched by his friendship with the King, acquiring estates in Mereworth, Maplescomb, and West Peckham in Kent, was proud of his knighthood and elected to be tried, at his impeachment, by battle. The lords refused, but when they all crammed into Westminster Hall for his trial, on February 17, 1388, they insisted on giving him a fair hearing. The King himself made a speech in his favor, which infuriated the appellants. (Eleven years later, in this very hall, Richard II would depose himself with a moving speech; Shakespeare immortalizes the moment.) On this occasion, his intervention did his favorite no good. Brembre was sent back to imprisonment in the Tower of London, whence the marshal should take him from the said City of London—“lui treyner parmye la dite cité de Loundres, et avant tan q’as ditz Fourches [Tyburn], et illeoqs lui prendre par le cool” (lawyers, the King, and his courtiers all conducted their business, in the late fourteenth century, in French). 2
Brembre was only one of many Londoners before and since who made his last journey down the course of what is now Oxford Street to Tyburn to be hanged by the neck. Today, as we go on the top of a bus from Selfridges to Marble Arch, we might sometimes reflect on those who trundled in the same direction in a cart, to the jeering or cheering of crowds, to meet this grisly fate. Brembre, like almost all of them, is a forgotten figure today.
One detail from his trial arrests our attention. As Gloucester’s witnesses brought more and more outlandish complaints against the knightly grocer, one of them claimed that he had referred to London as “the New Troy.” It remains obscure, at this date, why this had seemed so damaging. Perhaps the witness remembered that the old Troy had gone up in flames, so that the appellation seemed seditious.
Certainly Brembre did not invent the idea of London as the New Troy. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his History of the Kings of Britain, tells how one Brutus, a Trojan warrior, is told by the goddess Diana that “beyond the setting of the sun, past the realms of Gaul, there lies an island in the sea, once occupied by giants. Now it is empty and ready for your folk. Down the years this will prove an abode suited to you and to your people; and for your descendants it will be a second Troy. A race of kings will be born there from your stock and the round circle of the whole earth will be subject to them.”3 Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1155) was a Celt and he gloried in the idea that London owed its origin to a legendary hero named Brutus or Brut, the eponymous founder of Brut—or Britain.
Modern chroniclers, guided by the archaeologists and by the Roman historian Cassius Dio, have attributed the origins of London to the Romans. Julius Caesar passed through, during his invasion of 54 B.C., and might well have seen Gauls in mud-and-wattle huts settling on the banks of the Thames, but it is the invasion of A.D. 43 that signaled the arrival of Romans as a permanency. London was occupied, or founded, by Aulus Plautius, the first governor of Britain, who seems to have enabled his emperor, Claudius, to cross the river at a site undetermined. (The first Roman bridge over the river was in the Southwark/City area, but most scholars seem to believe that Claudius crossed farther upstream, near Westminster.)
There remain abundant traces of Roman London. The City Wall, built of Kentish ragstone, may still be seen at Tower Hill, in St. Alphage’s churchyard, and at London Wall. Nothing survives of the large basilica and forum, built over a site of eight acres and the largest north of the Alps. But in 1954, on the now dry banks of the Walbrook, one of London’s lost rivers, were found the remains of a Temple of Mithras, with many artefacts—heads of Mithras the bull slayer, Serapis, and Minerva; a group of Bacchus and his companions; a silver canister; an incense strainer; a relief of Mithras killing the bull. At the north end of Lower Thames Street, a Roman bath was discovered, and there are mosaic pavements under a number of City buildings, including 11 Ironmonger Lane and the Bank of England.
The formidable British warrior queen Boudicca, or Boadicea, could massacre legionaries and make her furious last stand in a battle in London in A.D. 60, but she was warring against the inevitable. In Roman times, Britain was wholly a “part of Europe,” as the modern phrase has it. A tombstone in the Guildhall Museum shows a relief of a gentleman wearing a toga. Tacitus tells us these marks of Romanness were worn everywhere in Romano-British cities. Life was clearly civilized, to judge from the bea
utiful Roman samian vase, late second century, discovered in Southwark, or the Roman beaker decorated with a leaping stag, unearthed in Jewry Street.
In its glory days, Roman London probably numbered 25,000 inhabitants and was perhaps the fifth largest city of the northern provinces. It was essentially the product of Romans’ needs and skills. They needed to bring their ships as far up the estuary as possible, and to unload men and goods at a point where they could be dispersed to the rest of the country. For two miles along the northern foreshore, from what is now the Tower of London to Waterloo Bridge, was a firm gravel terrace ideal for their purpose. But the point of London was lost on more primitive peoples who could not build fortifications or roads to match those of the Romans. The saucer-shaped London basin, stretching from the Chilterns to the North Downs, was, for the primitive tribesmen of Britain, not merely vulnerable to attack but thickly wooded and clayey (hence difficult to cultivate).
When the last legions vanished in 410, London began to crumble. When in 601 St. Augustine arrived with a different form of Roman conquest to baptize the Germanic settlers, he would have found the Roman city in ruins. The Saxons never made bricks; their houses, and most of their churches, would have been of wattle and daub. Though some revival took place during the times of Alfred the Great, and the Danish king Cnut, it was not really until the Norman Conquest that London could be said to resume a history worthy of the name.
3
NORMAN LONDON
The tourist to London wants to see the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey. Both were creations of the Normans, though the present Abbey Church dates from the reign of Henry III and was begun in 1245. Before William the Conqueror entered London, Edward the Confessor (1042–1066) had founded the Benedictine monastery on the Isle of Thorns (Thorney). Edward was English on his father’s side, Norman-French on his mother’s, and from a cultural point of view the Conquest began in his reign and with his founding of this abbey. The monks, many of them, were French. Their handwriting was French. Their seals were French. When William conquered England in the year of Edward’s death, he carried on the great building work of his cousin the saintly Confessor, and the abbey church contains Edward’s shrine.
There was enormous significance in the fact that Duke William of Normandy, the Conqueror, chose to be crowned King of England in Westminster. This great monastic church has witnessed the coronation of all the kings and queens of England save two Edwards (the Fifth, who was murdered in the Tower as a child, and the Eighth, who abdicated).
The Coronation Chair dates from the time of Edward I. Having conquered Scotland, he had designed a chair which was to be placed in God’s House in Westminster and which would contain the holy stone. This stone was a relic of great importance to the vanquished Scots; some said it was the very pillow on which St. Columba had rested his head. It was brought south with the greatest solemnity. Scottish nationalists have resented its seizure ever since, because it came as a symbol of the fact, expressed by the metrical legend of Sir William Wallace, “Quhar that Stayne is, Scotti’s suld master be.” But throne and stone were designed to be all of a piece. The ancient stone upon which the kings of Scotland had been proclaimed, time out of mind, should now be contained, as in a reliquary (which is what the holy chair is) beside the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor. It was placed in an elevated position and looked down the Abbey like a bishop’s throne, speaking of the link, from the very beginning, between the peoples of the British Isles, united under God and under the Crown of Westminster.
When they were opening the devolved Scottish Assembly in 1999, Prime Minister John Major, a latter-day iconoclast to rival the Puritan vandals who attacked the Abbey in the reign of Charles I, tore out the stone and without ceremony sent it back to Scotland, not to be placed in a position of sacred honor but just as an exhibit. The symbolism of seven hundred years was mindlessly destroyed in an afternoon.
Westminster Abbey, magnificent as it remains, both as one of the finest Gothic churches in Christendom and as our national Valhalla, with its many tombs of heroes, statesmen, poets, musicians, had lost something irreplaceable. It had ceased to be a shrine and become a tourist attraction.
The Bayeux Tapestry, that strip cartoon woven to depict the Norman Conquest, shows a comet in the sky hovering over the Abbey, seeing the Abbey as the symbol of the new era that was coming to London and to England. Over the Confessor’s Abbey, a man grasps its weathercock with one hand, while the other rests on the roof of the Palace of Westminster.
From the start of the Norman administration the seat of government was at Westminster, which in those days was more or less an island, connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus at the point where, now, Birdcage Walk enters Great George Street.
The Palace of Westminster is so called because it was here that the kings lived. It was here that they summoned their parliaments of lords spiritual (bishops) and temporal. Westminster Hall was completely redesigned in the reign of Richard II, but that great medieval building which we see today, and which has witnessed the lying in state of Sir Winston Churchill and of kings and queens, as well as many historic events such as the trial of Charles I, is built on the site of its predecessor. The first Westminster Hall, of 1097–99, was a rugged structure built in Caen stone. The distinctive white of this Norman stone was to become characteristic of London’s great public buildings, though nearly all the great buildings from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries were in Portland stone.
The white stone of Caen, however, was used to build the other famous London landmark that any tourist wants to see: namely, the Tower. If Westminster, the Norman capital, tells us that London was henceforward the seat of government, the Tower reminds us of the city’s strategic importance. Since the Romans left, there had been no one with the skill to construct a truly effective port in the river basin, or to guard it from the strategic position of what is now Tower Hill. But this is what the Normans did, with one of the most magnificent of their castles.
The Tower was a fortress; its donjon or keep was the White Tower, whose Caen stone walls are fifteen feet thick. Its great complex of buildings, and its moat and its river frontage, are themselves the most eloquent possible history of London. This place, as well as being a fortress defending the port, has also been a royal palace, a treasury (it still guards the Crown Jewels), and, in early days, the Royal Mint.
If we are exploring early medieval London and trying to find out its essence and its history, we must briefly mention two other extraordinary survivals (or, in one case, half survival).
In Smithfield, near the great meat market and the Cloth Fair, is the abbey church of St. Bartholomew, a glorious piece of sturdy Romanesque whose nave rivals Durham or Peterborough Cathedral’s. Next to this church is St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, founded by the same monk, the Augustinian canon Rahere, who built the abbey. From 1123, this hospital was a place of healing for the sick. The same supposedly Conservative Government that ripped the Stone of Destiny from its reliquary in Westminster Abbey also proposed the closure of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, but luckily this death sentence was repealed.
The other great medieval building to consider here is the Temple Church. The Knights Templar wore white tunics adorned with red crosses, which showed them to be immune from all jurisdiction save that of the Pope. Their task was to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land. Their first London church was built in 1162; this one dates from 1185. The Round Church was constructed in imitation of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. It was damaged by German bombs in the Second World War, but luckily much of it has survived. It is a place with an extraordinarily powerful atmosphere, speaking of England’s half-forgotten past.
The Temple, as the whole area was designated, passed out of the Templars’ hands, and in the fourteenth century the Knights Hospitaller leased it to lawyers. Ever since, the Inns of Court have been found here, the Middle Temple and the Inner Temple. Not far away are the other surviving Inns of Court, Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn. The
Inns are not pubs, as their name suggested, but colleges of lawyers, places where the law is studied and where the barristers congregate in their chambers to practice and dispute the law.
Thus we see that from the very earliest medieval times, London has been the center of government at Westminster. It has been a great trading port, protected by the Tower. It has been a great center of medicine and of the other profession, the law.
4
CHAUCER’S LONDON
The nursery rhyme about London Bridge falling down is a strange piece of folk memory of an Old Norse poem dating from the reign of Cnut—“London Bridge is broken down/Gold is won and bright renown.” London Bridge, once built of stone in 1176, was not in the habit of falling down as often as “My fair lady” was informed. In fact, its massive structure survived until demolished in the reign of William IV. They pulled it down because it was too narrow for the volume of traffic it bore, and too encrusted with low arches. The only bridge downstream from Kingston until the eighteenth century, it was a place of trade, concourse, and residence, a bit like an enormous Rialto. Houses were built along it. The heads of traitors and criminals (parboiled and then dipped in tar to preserve them) adorned it. In the middle of the bridge was a chapel dedicated to the memory of Thomas Becket.