Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
LEGENDS
Until Elizabethan times, most Londoners believed that London had been founded around
1000 BC as New Troy or
Troia Nova
(later corrupted to Trinovantum), capital of Albion (aka
Britain), by the Trojan prince
Brutus
. At the time, according to medieval chronicler Geoffrey of
Monmouth, Britain was “uninhabited except for a few giants”, several of whom the Trojans
subsequently killed. They even captured one called Goemagog (more commonly referred to as
Gogmagog), who was believed to be the son of Poseidon, Greek god of the sea, and whom
one of the Trojans, called Corineus, challenged to unarmed combat and defeated.
For some reason, by late medieval times, Gogmagog had become better known as two
giants,
Gog and Magog
, whose statues can still be seen in the Guildhall (see p.169) and on
the clock outside St Dunstan-in-the-West (see p.155). According to Geoffrey of Monmouth's
elaborate genealogical tree, Brutus is related to Leir (of Shakespeare's
King Lear
), Arthur (of the
Round Table) and eventually to
King Lud
. Around 70 BC, Lud is credited with fortifying New
Troy and renaming it
Caer Ludd
(Lud's Town), which was later corrupted to Caerlundein and
finally London.
temples, bathhouses and an amphitheatre (see p.171). Archeological evidence suggests
that Londinium was at its most prosperous and populous from around 80 AD to
120 AD, during which time it is thought to have evolved into the empire's fifth largest
city north of the Alps.
Between 150 AD and 400 AD, however, London appears to have sheltered less than
half the former population, probably due to economic decline. Nevertheless, it remained
strategically and politically important and, as an imperial outpost, actually appears to
have benefited from the chaos that engulfed the rest of the empire during much of the
third century. In those uncertain times,
fortifications
were built, three miles long, 20ft
high and 9ft thick, whose Kentish ragstone walls can still be seen near today's Museum
of London (see p.169), home to many of the city's most significant Roman finds.
In 406 AD, the Roman army in Britain mutinied for the last time and invaded Gaul
under the self-proclaimed Emperor Constantine III. The empire was on its last legs,
and the Romans were never in a position to return, o
cially abandoning the city in
410 AD
(when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths), and leaving the country and its
chief city at the mercy of the marauding Saxon pirates, who had been making
increasingly persistent raids on the coast since the middle of the previous century.
Saxon Lundenwic and the Danes
Roman London appears to have been more or less abandoned from the first couple of
decades of the fifth century until the ninth century. Instead, the
Anglo-Saxon
invaders,
who
controlled most of southern England by the sixth century, appear to have settled,
initially at least, to the west of the Roman city. When Augustine was sent to reconvert
Britain to Christianity, the Saxon city of
Lundenwic
was considered important enough
to be granted a bishopric in 604, though it was Canterbury, not London, that was
chosen as the seat of the Primate of England. Nevertheless, trade flourished once more
during this period, as attested by the Venerable Bede, who wrote of London in 730 as
“the mart of many nations resorting to it by land and sea”.
410
604
878
1066
The Romans withdraw
from Britain
Mellitus, the first Bishop
of London, begins the
first St Paul's Cathedral
King Alfred defeats the
Vikings and England
is divided between
Danelaw and Wessex
William the Conqueror
defeats King Harold at
the Battle of Hastings
