London - Walter Besant

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grew between the stones. Here and there stood buildings larger than the houses; they, too, were roofless, but over the lintels were carved certain curious emblems – crosses and palm-branches, lambs, vine leaves, and even fish – the meaning of which they understood not. Then the men reached the river-side. Here there had also been a wall, but much of it was broken down; and here they found certain circular huts thatched. Within, the fire was still burning in the middle of the hut. There were signs of hurried departure – the fish was still in the frying-pan, the bed of dried leaves still warm. Where were the people?

      They were gone. They had fled in affright. When they heard the shouts of the Saxons, they gathered together their weapons and such things as they could carry, and they fled. They passed out by the gate of that road which their conquerors afterwards called Watling Street. Outside the City they turned northward, and plunged for safety into the pathless forest, whither the enemy would not follow.

      When these Saxons found that the walled area contained nothing that was of the least use to them they simply went away. They left it quite alone, as they left the places which they called Pevensey, Silchester, Porchester, and Richborough, and as they left many other waste chesters.

      Then Augusta lay silent and dead for a space.

      Presently the fugitives crept back and resumed their old life among the ruins and died peacefully, and were followed by their children.

      How, then, did London get settled again?

      The times became peaceful: the tide of warfare rolled westward; there were no more ships crossing with fresh invaders; there were no more pirates hovering about the broad reaches of the Lower Thames. The country round London on all sides – north, south, east, and west – was settled and in tranquillity. The river was safe. Then a few merchants, finding that the way was open, timidly ventured up the river with wares such as might tempt those fair-haired savages. They went to the port of which the memory survived. No one disputed with them the possession of the grass-grown quays; there were no people, there was no market, there were no buyers. They then sent messengers to the nearest settlements; these – the first commercial travellers, the first gentlemen of the road – showed spear-heads of the finest, swords of the stoutest, beautiful helmets and fine shields, all to be had in exchange for wool and hides. The people learned to trade, and London began to revive. The rustics saw things that tempted them; new wants, new desires were created in their minds. Some of them went into the town and admired its life, how busy it was, how full of companionship; and they thought with pity of the quiet country life and the long days all alone in the fields; they desired to stay there; others saw the beauty of the arts, and were attracted by natural aptitude to learn and practise them. Others, quicker witted than the rest, perceived how by trade a man may live without his own handiwork and by the labor of his brother man. No discovery ever was made more important to the world than this great fact. "You, my brother," said this discoverer, "shall continue to dig and to toil, in hot weather or cold; your limbs shall stiffen and your back shall be bent; I, for my part, will take your work and sell it in places where it is wanted. My shoulders will not grow round, nor will my back be bent. On the contrary, I shall walk jocund and erect, with a laughing eye and a dancing leg, when you are long past laugh or saraband. It is an excellent division of labor. To me the market, where I shall sit at ease chaffering with my wares and jesting with my fellows and feasting at night. To you the plough and the sickle and the flail. An excellent division."

      Then more merchants came, and yet more merchants, and the people began to flock in from the country as they do now; and London – Augusta being dead – set her children to work, making some rich, for an example and a stimulus – else no one would work – and keeping the many poor – else there would be no chance for the few to get rich. And she has kept them at work ever since. So that it came to pass when Bishop Mellitus, first of the bishops of London, came to his diocese in the year 604, he found it once more a market and a port with a goodly trade and a crowd of ships and a new people, proud, turbulent, and independent.

      So began and so grew modern London.

      To the old Rome it owes nothing, not so much as a tradition. Later, when another kind of influence began, London learned much and took much from Rome; but from Augusta – from Roman London – nothing. Roman traditions, Roman speech, Roman superstitions linger yet among the southern Spaniards, though the Moor conquered and held the country for six hundred years. They linger, in spite of many conquests, in France, in Italy (north and south), in Roumania, in Anatolia. In London alone, of all the places which Imperial Rome made her own, and kept for hundreds of years, no trace of ancient Rome remains. When London next hears of the Eternal City it is Rome of the Christian Church.

      Compare the conquest of London by the men of Essex with that of Jerusalem by Titus. The latter conqueror utterly destroyed the city, and drove out its people. One might have expected the silence of Silchester or Pevensey. No, the people crept back by degrees; the old traditions remained and still remain. Behind the monkish sites are those familiar to the common people. Here is the old place of execution – the monks knew nothing of that – here is the valley of Hinnom; here that of Kedron. These memories have not died. But of the old Augusta nothing at all remains. Not a single tradition was preserved by the scanty remnant of slaves which survived the conquest; not a single name survives. All the streets have been renamed – nay, their very course has been changed. The literature of the City, which, like Bordeaux, had its poets and its schools of rhetoric, has disappeared; it has vanished as completely as that of Carthage. All the memories of four hundred years have gone; there is nothing left but a few fragments of the old wall, and these seem to contain but little of the Roman work: an old bath, part of the course of an ancient street, and the fragment which we call London Stone. Perhaps some portions of the Roman river-wall have been unearthed, but this is uncertain.

      One fact alone has been considered to suggest that some of the old Roman buildings remained and were used again for their old purposes.

      In the oldest part of the City, that which lies along the river-bank, the churches are mostly dedicated to the apostles. Those which stand farther inland are dedicated to local and later saints – St. Dunstan, St. Botolph, St. Osyth, St. Ethelburga, for instance. But among those along the river are the churches of St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary, St. Stephen, St. Michael. It is therefore suggested, but with hesitation, that when the East Saxons took possession they found the Roman basilicas still standing; that when they became converted they learned the original purpose of their churches and the meaning of the emblems; that they proceeded to rebuild them, preserving their dedications, and made them their own churches. This may be so, but I do not think it at all likely. It is possible, I say, but not probable.

      You have heard the story how Augusta disappeared, and how the East Saxons found it deserted, and how London was born, not the daughter of Augusta at all. Augusta was childless.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER I

      The principal Roman buildings consisted of a bridge, a wall, a fort at either end of this bridge, and two ports – Queenhithe and Billingsgate. No one knows when the bridge was built: the wall was not erected until some time between A.D. 350 and A.D. 369. At that time the area enclosed by the wall was covered with villas and gardens. The wall has been traced with certainty, and portions either of the original wall or the mediæval repairs have been found in many places, and may still be seen above-ground. The Roman remains which have been dug up consist of mosaic pavements, sepulchral cists, keys, toilet articles, lamps, fibulæ, amphoræ, domestic things, and a few bronze statuettes. Nothing whatever has been found to show that Augusta was ever a great city, in the sense that Massilia, Ephesus, Bordeaux, or Alexandria was great.

      II

      SAXON AND NORMAN

      The citizens of New London – Augusta having thus perished – were from the outset a people of mixed race. But the Saxons, and especially the East Saxons, prevailed. Strangely, it is Essex which has always prevailed in London. The modern Cockney dialect, which says "laidy" and "baiby" for lady and baby, and "whoy" and "hoigh" for why and high, is pure Essex: you can hear it spoken all over the country districts of that little-visited county: it is a dialect so strong that it destroys all other fashions of speech, even the burr of Cumberland and the broad drawl of Devonshire. Saxon London was mainly East Saxon. But, besides the new owners of London, there was, first of all, some remnant

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