Gone Medieval - Saxon Origins of London

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

From ghost town to ceremonial, ecclesiastical and economic hub - how did London develop in the Saxon era, and how is that crucial to what London has become? Dr. Rory Naismith is the author of Citadel of the Saxons: The Rise of Early London and a lecturer at Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. He takes Dr. Cat Jarman through the story of London from its decline after the Roman period to its eventual reemergence. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. My name is Dr. Kat Jarman and today I'm going to be talking about Saxon London. The bustling megalopolis of London has been described as one of the world's greatest and most resilient cities. But while the story of modern London is pretty well known, a less familiar side of its history is its development in the early medieval period. But this face is crucial for understanding what London was to become later on. So to find out all about Saxon London, I've invited Dr Rory Ney Smith to the podcast today. Welcome Rory.

Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Now Rory is a lecture in the history of England before the Norman Conquest at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, North and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, and he's written several books, including the brilliant citadel of the Saxons, The Rise of Early London. So that's what we're going to do. going to be talking about today and the content of Roy's book. But just start off the conversation. By learning about London's Saxon origins, can that help us understand anything about how and why the way it is today? I'd say yes. I think that in many ways, London as the entity we understand it to be now within the context of England and Britain and the world, that's to say as basically a mega city,

a huge, important place where there's lots of trade and lots of government and lots of cultural things going on, concentrated in one place, you can trace that back to the early Middle Ages. And you can see London taking on that role, particularly in governmental, military, economic terms, very rapidly in the decades around the year 100. It's about then that you start to see it become the mega city of England. It goes on from there to become the mega city of Britain and then of the British Empire and what it is today. So this is a really good starting point then to understand how it gets to that point. Now, obviously, this podcast is about the medieval period, but I think we do very briefly, just to start off, have to go a little bit further back in time

to understand how Saxon London develop. So what's the actual earliest evidence we have for a town in that location? It's essentially the Roman period that there had obviously been people living in what's now greater London for much, much longer than that. But as a concentrated, substantial urban settlement, it first appears in the aftermath of the Roman conquest of Britain. So this is the middle of the first century AD. And that's known as Londinium, isn't it, that city? Yes, there's some debate as to what word this comes from in the languages that were being spoken in Britain. It probably means something to do with a watery or reedy place,

which makes a lot of sense by the banks of the Thames. And in fact, one of the characteristic things of pre-Roman London is all of these wonderful, valuable gold, other metallic artefacts that were deposited in the Thames as some kind of votive offerings. So that river really is, as big part of the key, just as it was in later times, just from the start. Oh yeah, I think the Thames has been a huge part of London's identity, economy for a long, long time. And what do we know about Roman London then? We know quite a lot. And what's interesting is there aren't actually all that many textual sources in terms of manuscripts that were copied and passed down over time.

Most of the information comes from archaeology, from things that have been excavated in the city, and particularly impressive, are a whole host of written materials, like writing tablets that came to light actually mostly pretty recently within the last 10 years or so. And these shed incredibly bright and wonderful light onto the Society of London in particularly the first century AD. You can see masters, you can see slaves, you can see education, you can see soldiers, you can see a city that comes to life. It's not just holes in the ground. It's a place where people actually lived. And it really thrived, didn't it, for quite a long period of time, for several centuries. It did. It was at its peak in terms of number of people and trade and that sort of thing in about the first and second centuries AD. And it was the pre-eminent city of Roman Britain. It was always a bit of a weird case in Roman Britain because it didn't fit into some of the regular classifications of Roman cities.

It wasn't what was called a Kivitas capital, so like a centre of one of the... units of local government in Britain. It wasn't what they called a colonia, which was a sort of special settlement of ex-Roman soldiers. It was a sort of sui generis example that thrived on its connections with the outside world, and also on the fact that it was closely connected with a number of these Kivitas units around it. So it was almost important because it was a sort of on the edge in between sort of place. And paradoxically, that then made it a centre in its own right, as the provinces of Britain became more of an entity. But then when we get to the end of the Roman period,

does the city survive on its own, or does it decline almost immediately? Yes, it declines almost to nothing as far as we can see in the course of the 5th century. And it had been in a pretty ropy position for quite some time before then. Because London remained one of the focal points of Roman government, there was still relatively large investment and activity.

Some parts of the walls were still. being worked on and maintained right down to the end of the fourth century. But by that stage, it was a kind of shell with a few administrative institutions and soldiers in it, not that many people actually living there. What activity there was in and around London by that stage, and into the fifth century, was mostly on the edge of the city. There's an interesting set of excavations on the edge of what's now Trafalgar Square, for example, which is well outside the bounds of the form of Roman city, which is effectively the city with a capital C as it is now. Okay, so if we go then to that start of the medieval period, so 500 AD or so,

was this sort of almost a bit of a ghost town or were the people living there? Yeah, I choose to imagine it, like something out of, pick your sort of fantasy film of choice, like talking or something, it's a place that's full of ruins, it's got hardly anyone if anyone actually living there on a permanent basis. People would still have known it had been important, they would have known what it was called, there would have been a lot of open land within it because of course most of the buildings of Roman London would have been made of wood,

just with a few monumental ones made out of stone. So it would have been an evocative place in the landscape, but not necessarily anymore. In fact, definitely not anymore, a hub of actual people and administration and that sort of... And you mentioned some of the archaeology earlier, and obviously I know we hate the term dark ages as all of that, but of course the idea of that is the fact that we don't know that much about

but what happens now. So what sort of evidence do we really really? have for those first few centuries? That's a very good question. And the short answer is not very much, which is why in the case of London, dark age in the context of not knowing very much, is really quite apt for the fifth and six centuries.

There's a small smattering of archaeological material from within the city itself. There's a somewhat larger, there's still not huge amount of material like early burials, a few settlements from what's now the greater London area, roughly within the M25. This is something that archaeologists and historians have become more conscious of in about the last 50, 60 years. If you go back to literature from the early 20th century, people talked about there being a Rumanu British enclave around London into the 5th and 6th centuries

because they just haven't found very much in terms of burials and settlements up to that point. That's now no longer accepted. It's now thought that the area around London was settled and developed in much the same way as the rest of East. south-eastern Britain. There are references to London in later historical sources that relate to this period. We hear about how there were various battles fought around it in the 5th century in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but those entries are extremely dubious. They're basically seen as made up now, almost as much fantasy as Tolkien was. Yes, I guess a lot of the early parts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is just filling in some gaps,

isn't it? And then, yeah, you don't really know, so you stick something in there perhaps. But then if we go a bit forward again to this, the sort of seventh and up towards the 9th century. I think the key point then is to understand also some of the wider political situation around London in England in general. I know that there's a big question. What's going on that then has an impact on the development of Saxon London? If we think about the period from about the middle of the 7th century onwards, England at that stage is made up of a number of different kingdoms.

And in fact, there's an awful lot of these kingdoms, if you take them in their totality. Some of them are very small and they're usually part. of much bigger kind of conglomerate kingdoms. And the major conglomerate kingdoms that had interests in the area around London were Kent to the southeast. There was a kingdom of the East Saxons, which is where we get Essex from. That had been an autonomous kingdom early on, but by the mid to late 7th century, it was effectively part of the dominion of one of the other major players who were the

Mercians. And their power base was really in what's now the West Midlands, but they were moving down into the southeast as well. So you can see the kings of the Mercians are active in places like Surrey and Middlesex as well. And the kings of the West Saxons too, already at this date, sometimes extend to have involvement in the London region as well. Now, what's interesting is that in the Roman period, London benefited from having all these different kingdoms, Kivitas units around it, sometimes called tribes. But we're talking about areas roughly the size of a county. In the sort of middle-anglish Saxon period here, you can see that sort of

of profile beginning to come online again, that London is benefiting from the fact it has a number of these different kingdoms, these different agglomerations of power and wealth and people who want an interest in this trading centre that's connected also with the seas and the outside world. So again, London being on the Thames where you can cross over to get north and south and you can go up or down the river to get in and out, is starting to become once again a place where people come to do business and interact with the... those from other kingdoms. Yeah, and this is exactly what becomes really important in the next step for London,

isn't it? So if we're moving into what becomes known as London Wick, then that sort of trade in those connections are hugely important. So can you explain a bit about the Wick element of that? What are those wicks? Wick is a term from Old English, which is an element that's often used in place names. It still survives in It's Witch, for example, Sandwich, various others.

And it means something like specialised. settlement. I mean, it's probably not that concrete. It's used for lots of places where it's quite hard to see what the specialised element might have been. But it was a term that was actually used quite generically. But it did apply to a number of these new coastal settlements that developed into a sort of a town. I stress town, because interestingly, they didn't use terms like in Latin kivitas or some of the others for them, which they reserved more for cities that had a Roman history, which had a bishop. Lundonwick was more of almost a kind of shant. It doesn't have walls, it doesn't have churches, it doesn't have public spaces and monuments in the same way as we think a city really should.

And that's because in contemporary eyes, it wasn't really a city as such. It served quite a different purpose. And you went a mile down the river to get to London, the city for those other kind of ceremonial, ecclesiastical, administrative purposes. London was a very economically focused place. It was full of craftsmen. It was full of traders. have lots of connections with estates and trade and travel from the outside world. So it served a very different purpose to the Episcopal Centre is already there. But that openness, that degree of welcome almost that was extended to people who came in from a number of different kingdoms of what made it valuable, whoever controlled them didn't shut other people out. They wanted them to come in so they could then cream off tolls from them

and to have first pick of what was being brought into the city. So that was really quite a profitable place to have a stake in Londonwick. then I very much. We know that one of the kings of the Merseysking, Athelbald, who ruled from 716 to 757, he quite unusually issues a whole series of charters mostly relating to London, which grant exemption from the tolls that were normally being charged there. And so paradoxically, we only know about these tolls because in a special case, the king says you don't have to pay them with the implication that normally you did. So Athelbold must have had people who are on the spot in London, ready to jump up whenever a ship appeared,

and say, hang on a minute, you've got to pay up this much to me for the king. So he really knew why he was doing. So Londonwick, it really thrives for quite some time, doesn't it? And expands quite rapidly, does it? It does. It starts off around about the year 600 on a pretty modest scale. It expands considerably and quite rapidly in the last 30 or so years of the 7th century and even more so as you go into the 8th century.

So it's real heydays from about 670 to... maybe the late 8th century. So it's at its biggest then. It remains important after that, but it seems to have become a bit more dispersed, a bit more broken up. It's rather hard to handle on exactly where it stops and starts in the late 8th and 9th century. People still clearly thought it was important, but archaeologically its footprint is a little bit harder to pin down. So could that be more about the evidence we have, do you think, or do you think that is a real change? Or is it just that we haven't found it yet? I think it's a real change. I think it's a real change, but I think that

the evidence is there. Overall, there is a reasonable amount of material from London in the late 8th and early 9th century. It's just much more spread out. Instead of being concentrated in this area from roughly Trafalgar Square to Lincoln's Inn Fields, which is where the core of earlier

Londonwick was, we've got stuff as far afield as Pallsen Westminster, Downing Street, up to the edge of the city of London. So that's an area of a good couple of miles. And what I think we need to imagine is instead of our kind of permanent car boot sale. We've now got a whole landscape with little clumps of cars or vans or whatever it is doing their business with a bit of open land in between. Yeah, that's a really good point, isn't it, that this isn't something that's centrally planned as such. It just, it's more

organic. No, that's very good point. I think that London is much more organic. I think, yeah, there is input into it from the Mercy and Kings, from the Kentish kings earlier on, but that I think the actual growth is really left in the hands of the people coming in to build, perhaps other landowners. I think it is very much organic. I think that's right. Now, we're going to move forward a little bit again to later on in the 9th century where another person comes into the picture, because, according to the historical records, in 886, Alfred the Great gets involved in London. Can you tell us about what happens and what we know about that? I can, except that it's a rather complicated question,

because we don't know exactly what Alfred does in London. The word they use in Old English is Yaceta. The tricky thing is that the Anglican Chronicle talks about how he comes in. He does this to London. And it could mean something like establish, as in he sort of recreates a settlement, or it could mean something like he restores it, he maybe rebuilds the walls, he reorganises the military, something like that. In the Latin translation of Asser, who was active at about the same time,

he translates this word as Restaravit, as restored. So he's thinking about Alfred definitely redoing something in London. Now, the text don't go much further than that. What we can see from the archaeology is that London was undergoing redevelopment at about this time. It had definitely started earlier than that. London, within the walls of Roman London, had seen more development, more activity since about the middle of the 9th century. And so Alfred was coming along when there was already this incipient settlement, and he may have reorganised it,

relayed out some of the streets, perhaps reorganised the way the walls are being manned, because of course the Roman rules enclosed a much larger area than this whole settlement, so it would have taken quite a bit of efforts to try and keep those up to scratch and keep them manned if the Vikings ever showed up. What we do know Alfred did in 886,

other than actually restoring the city, is that he then hosts a kind of meeting in London where all the English who were not under Viking control swear allegiance to him, and then at that event he hands over control of the city to this character called Ailderman Ethelred of the Mercians, who of course is now one of Alfred's subordinate, so it's still very much Alfred's city, but now it's being looked after by this character from Mercia, really just reaffirming the long-standing connection between the Midland Kingdom of Mercia and London. So this meeting is a crucial demonstration of the

status Alfred's got. He's calling himself King of the Angles and Saxon. because the Mercians thought they'd been angles, the West Saxons, called themselves Saxons. Crucially, London is chosen for this, partly because it's got this Roman history of centrality, but also because it's now a three-way frontier city. You've got Mercia to the north. You've got Wessex on the south bank of the Thames. And then you've also got, just across the River Lee in the, what's now the Docklands, so about a mile east of London, the Vikings.

So within sight of Viking territory, he's giving this big finger to them, basically, say. that we the English are now all aligned against you. We're a single block and here we're making a stand. And that's a really good point because for a few decades before this, Alfred really is very heavily involved in this sort of fight against the Vikings against the Great Army especially. So how much of a threat were the Vikings to London at that point in time, do you think? In 886 specifically, not quite as big a threat as they had been.

There are references to the Vikings coming to London, even apparently occupying London for a period in the run-up to this, in the period from the 870s into the early 880s. So, yes, they had been a very real threat. There had even been a Viking camp at one stage in Fulham. So just a little down the river from London, there was a settlement that might not have been unlike Tauksie or Repton. I don't think there's any solid evidence for exactly where or what form that might have taken in Fulham. But, yes, the Vikings had been there. The Vikings had been a serious threat to London. And so it was no easy mass to deal with.

And you mentioned these different kingdoms earlier on. And I just wanted to ask you about some of the coins and all the events of the 870s because they're quite interesting in telling about this relationship, especially between Mercia and Wessex and Alfred. Can you say something about that? Yeah, the coins are hugely important. And of course, we've now got the Watlington Horde, which has added a lot of new information to this picture that we've got.

The coins are really crucial because they show us what's going, on probably at London. One of the frustrating things about the coin is they never actually say made at London. That's not the way they do things at this time. It just gives you the name of the king and of the money. So it's a somewhat subjective process deciding which ones come from where. But assuming we're right about which ones we think come from London, what they show us is the interaction of West Saxon, Alfredian authority with that of the Mercians. So we see Alfred and Chale Wolf the second sharing control over the the mints of London. The moniers would make coins for both kings at various times, and they'd eventually,

of course, start making them just for Alfred. So the classic, what's called London monogram coins, which are these beautiful pennies of Alfred, which adopt a Roman-style bust for him and a monogram for London, Londonia and Latin, on the reverse. These come from about the year 880. So those are the kind of climax of this process, where London has gone from being a Mercian city under West Saxon influence to a kind of condominium where Alfred is recognised as an overlord alongside the Mercian king through to a place where Alfred is definitely in charge, even though we know there is still a Mercian ruler who's calling himself ruler of London, that Alfred is now recognised as top dog.

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length of the city, the Roman walled area along the Thames, which is roughly from St Paul's to the Tower of London. It's very small, and it only extends a little bit into the city. It's probably only got a few thousand people living there. Its economic horizons are much more localised than those of Lundonwick had been. Londonwick was trading with places all over northern Europe. Alphredian London and early 10th century London is. much more focused on trade within southern England, up the Thames in particular. So it's in some ways a much less impressive place for all that it's now situated within the Roman walls. But in relative terms, in the context of the urban landscape, as it was at that time, it was hugely important.

It was one of the key strongholds in southern England. It was one of the most important mint places, despite all of these shortcomings compared to its earlier development. And within the city, the buildings would have been mostly quite small. They would have been wooden. They would have been full of lice and mice and rats. They wouldn't have been very nice to live in. It wouldn't have been so very dissimilar from what if you go to, say, the Yorvik Viking Centre, and you go around and you see what these buildings excavates that York would have looked like.

London would have been smelling. It would have been dirty. It would have been a city in much the same way. We do know that there were some grander buildings starting to appear at this stage. In fact, because parts of the roof of one of them were used to, shore up the banks of the Thames in the late 10th century when they were trying to reclaim land from the river, they took bits of buildings and ships, rammed them down into the ground to try and hold back the water. And thanks to this and the waterlog conditions that resulted,

we've still got chunks of this building's roofing. And so we can see something that would have been an absolutely spectacular edifice, not entirely unlike Stave Church in Norway, several tiers of wooden beams going up and up over the ground. And then we can contrast that with a window, though it's a strong word for it, that was discovered in a wall plank from a much humbler building, which is basically just a small triangular hole carved into a plank. That's what you looked out of at your big stave church-like building if you were one of the less well-off people in early 10th century London. It was a place of contrasts and filth, but also a place of investment and royal power if you were moving in the right circles.

So that was really, if you were going to live in London, you'd have to have a good reason for your trade or business or whatever, presumably. Yeah, warfare is the other important thing, especially. We know that in the late 9th century, London is very real part of the military arrangements Alfred puts in place against the Vikings, that the Londoners go out and fight. They join other towns and armies to go out and fight. Not always terribly well, but they certainly give it their role. Yeah, and we're going to move a bit further ahead again, I think, just to talk about some more

of those threats from the Vikings if we go towards the 11th century, so it's around the turn of the millennium. Now, that's where there's quite a few events that are quite crucial. And I wanted to ask you especially about the events around the year 1016. So this is the year when Ethel Reddy and Reddy and Reddy dies and eventually Knut ends up at the King of England. What sort of role did London play in those events? London plays a very big role in these events. It had become not quite a capital. It's not a permanent base of government, but it had become a sort of of de facto center of Ethelred the Unready's regime by that point, and particularly of his military organization and of his financial organization. Now, the financial organization was crucial

this point because there were lots of armies in place all the time. Those needed to be supplied, and they were supplied by people raising money. So there was a lot of cash coming in just to keep the armies and fleets active, particularly these mercenary Vikings that Ethelred had hired on in 1012 to fight for him against the Vikings. The other crucial, thing about London is that it was where at least some of these major tribute payments to the Viking attackers were being gathered and then handed over. So there's a lot of money flowing into London. It's also still got these huge Roman walls, which are now maintained, possibly even restored to some degree. Its population has gone up, and it's one of the only places in the

kingdom which successfully fends off the Vikings. Fends them off every single time they come. In fact, the Vikings never managed to take London militarily in the course of Ethelred's reign, despite trying four or five times. And they try most vigorously in the years around 1016. We know that when Ethelred dies in London in that year, the Vikings are heading for the city. So this is in late April, and he's buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, very unusually. He hadn't necessarily planned for that.

And it might be a reflection both of how important London itself had become, but also of how important the military organisation, the faction based within London, had become as well. Because what we hear is that after Ethel Red has died, there's a struggle within England as to who will be the new king. And what ends up happening is Ethelred's oldest surviving son, Edmund Ironside, launches a claim to power against King Cunuch. But we know that there were some others in England who had wanted to recognise Cunute as king. what seems to have happened is that the Londoners are the ones who support Edmund. They're the ones who want to push on and fight. And so once they've made their case,

and Edmund has managed to assert his command over the rest of England, apart from Canute's army, of course, we see London being targeted by Canute as the epicentre of the English resistance to him. So there's very ferocious attacks on the city, which again London endures. And then there's a string of battles that start around London and progress, off into the northern part of Essex, which eventually lead to Edmund being defeated. So London is really at the heart of these developments. They're absolutely crucial to the political

military outcome of what's happening in the mid-10s and also crucial in establishing the precedent almost of London being a player in itself in saying who should be king and what they should do. And then after this point, so when eventually a Knewt ends up is king, Does London stay important to him or is his attention elsewhere? It does remain important but almost despite Canute's wishes. It looks like Canute seems to have been rather keener on Winchester and Canterbury. It's under Canute, for example, that the relics of this character called St. Alphea, who was an Archbishop of Canterbury that actually gets killed.

He gets to be pelted to death with oxbones by a bunch of drunk Vikings at Greenwich. And after he's killed, they take his body to St. Paul's. And he becomes a sort of rallying point of English resistance. and English pride. In the early 1020s, Knoot decides to remove the body of Altheir and take it from London to Canterbury Cathedral. So we hear about how this is undertaken in a later text from Canterbury as a kind of heist with a whole bunch of Knewts men

stationed around the city to try and fend off any English resistance. They do it on the quiet so no one will see. There's real fear of what might happen if this had gone awry. Having said all of that, London remains so important that Knew can't afford just to let it go. So he bases some of his key troops in the city. It's under him that London continues to be very important in terms of raising money and minting coinage. And of course, it's just got lots of people in it and lots of money in it. And he's, to some extent, dependent on those focal points of resources that had already been established before he came along.

So does London grow in size? Does it really become a bigger city at this point? Yes, it's definitely growing. You can see from about the late 10th century, about the 980s, 990s, you can start to see extension of the area within the Roman walls as being settled. You can also see Southwark across the river being developed at about this time as well. And you can see that about the year 100, London Bridge is rebuilt in wood for probably the first time since the Roman period. So yes, London is definitely growing. By the time you get to about the Norman conquest in the middle of the 11th century, it looks like there's now a relatively small area within the walled area of London

that is not under some sort of development by that stage. And even most of the street system that we now know of from the modern city of London is laid out at around this time. So that sort of brings us towards the end, really, of the Anglo-Saxon period. So you just mentioned the Norman Conquest. If we go to the events around 1066, does London have an important part to play there as well? It does, yes.

William the Conqueror comes over and of course wins the Battle of Hastings, but what's crucial where London comes in is what happens next because he goes on a long, rather circuitous march round through Kent, which is aiming at coming to London. So what he does is approach it from the south and he sends a group of knights to try and come at it through South. They are fought off by the Londoners. And this is something that the Norman chroniclers really emphasise about London, that it's big, it's rich, It's well defended and it's belligerent. So it's actually very much like the profile of the city that developed under Ethelred, that we think nowadays of cities as places that are soft and weak and not particularly great in military terms. But this was emphatically not the case in the early Middle Ages. In the 10th-11th century, cities, or at least cities like London, were the hard points in resistance because they not only had the defences, they had the people and they had the resources to use them.

So London would have been a very tough nut to crack if William had actually had to try and do so. what he does is take the bulk of his army and he heads off further down the Thames. He crosses at Wallingford. This is now getting into November, December, 1066, and so he ends up coming towards London from the north. Now, there's an attempted new regime being set up in London at this time under this character called Edgar the Affling, who was a great nephew of Edward the Confessor. And he's basically a boy. He's a teenager at this stage, so there's not a great deal of real hope being put in this, I don't think. but there are a number of major aristocrats and bishops who are in London trying to hedge their bets on whether Edgar's claim might be the one to follow.

And what happens is that as they see William and the size of his army coming in towards them, they gradually dribble out of London and surrender to him such that eventually all the major players in the city have gone. And so when William does show up, there is a preparation for siege, but it looks like there is no actual major fighting in the country. London, they basically give up. And William then comes into the city. He's crowned king in Westminster Abbey in 1066 just outside London. And he also around then, maybe even day of, day after his coronation, he grants a very unusual privilege, a writ to the Londoners, which guarantees their rights, their property, which is not something he did for many other English groups. Again, a bit like Canute. He recognises that London needs to be on site. He's got to have it under control, partly through building the Tower of London and another castle on the west side of the city,

which he also starts to do almost immediately, but also through getting the Londoners themselves on side. Okay, so that's got some really good insights into these sort of higher level events and the political situation. But what about the actual Londoners and how they live their lives and how life in the town is actually organised? We know that in the 930s or so there's this entity called the Peace Guilds, and these were units of 100 men. We know that there were a number of them, but not quite how many of them,

potentially thousands of people were involved in this, who were the people that belong to London. These are referred to in a set of statutes that the Peace Guild themselves put together under King Athelstan, who ruled from 924 to 939. And these are a wonderful set of information for telling us about how this group wanted to try and assert themselves and deal with other communities around them. Basically, they're claiming legal autonomy in the same way as other communities in Anglo-Saxon, England, at the period, which meant that they said, hey, we should be able to go and pursue, catch and potentially kill or punish anyone who wrongs us, anyone who steals from us. We want to go and chase them across the home counties, catch them, and then the first person who lands a blow will get a reward.

They're positively encouraging the Londoners to mount up and head off in hot pursuit of people who wrong them. So it's almost meant as a deterrent. They may well have done this, but I think the threat of them possibly doing this was more important. It was saying that London and the Londoners were a force to be reckoned with. Now, what's interesting is that this document is not just everyone who lives in the city. It's actually only some people who live in the city. We know that it includes people who are rich. We know it includes people who are poor.

We know it includes women because widows who don't have enough money to pay their normal subscription fee get to be a member for free. We also know that they have their own property. they had their own money. They were a very organised operation. And it gives us a flavour of just how structured and organised Londoners were. And this might have been the basis for their military organisation in earlier times. It might also have something to do with some of the institutions that still survive today, which we hear about emerging in the 11th century, like the husting, the house thing, the house meeting, which was the sort of upper chamber of medieval London's government. We know that this existed by the early years of the 11th century. that it was an important entity for deciding conflicts within the city. So we can see that already the Londoners are thinking of themselves as a legal administrative entity in the same way as a shire or as other towns, though they do seem to have had a slightly bigger, grander conception of what they could do and what their say-so meant.

For instance, the standard measure of weight for gold and silver in late Anglo-Saxon, that seems to have been the standard of the husting, the London standard that was promulmonary. from the city. So it gives us a flavour of just how important London was within the kingdom more widely and how the Londoners themselves really had quite a high opinion of themselves. That's a great way to end this, I think. Of course, this isn't the end of the story of London at all, and the medieval development is extremely important. Just for winding up now, I just wanted to ask you, if somebody is in London today and they wanted to see some of the Saxon London, where can you get a flavour?

or a sense of any sort of traces of that Saxon London today? I'd say that the best sense of it is actually from the walking that you'd do because the street names in the city, a great many of them go back to the Anglo-Saxon period. We in fact have a remarkable coin that was only found a couple of years ago, which is completely unique because it actually has not just a mint name, but a street name. It tells us that it was made by a money called Airdw on Estchepe, East Cheap, in London.

So we know that that street was already there and called East-Chief. cheap in the 1030s when this coin was made. You could walk down there and feel a certain sense of connection with these monies. We know we're doing things there. But if you want the actual stuff and actual buildings, it's rather harder because there have been hundreds of years of fires and bombings and rebuildings and God knows what else going on in London. So there's very little still above ground. There is, to my knowledge, just there are the Roman walls, of course, which were still being used in the Anglo-Saxon period. But there's only one building which contains traces that might go back to this period. And this is the church of all

hallows by the tower or all hallows barking, which is, as the name suggests, right beside the Tower of London. No one actually knew about the Anglo-Saxon elements of this building until the Blitz, when part of the building was damaged and they found in the repairs that there was this archway in the church tower that might well go back to the 11th century or even earlier. Having said that there are so few actual standing buildings, there's an awful lot of archaeological material that's been found. For all that London is very built up, there's actually been a huge amount of archaeological work

done on a kind of pinprick-like basis over the years. So overall, there's actually a pretty good profile of what London looked like archaeologically. And things that have been found in the course of those excavations can now be seen some of them in the British Museum, lots of them in the Museum of London. There are some wonderful bits of early medieval stone carving with inscriptions on them in all hallows by the town.

and in a couple of other London parish churches. So my advice would be to take a wander around the city, go up onto the Roman walls, go and have a coffee at all hallows barking, and then end the day by going to the Museum of London of the British Museum. That sounds like an excellent plan. So thank you so much for that.

Rory, that's been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for joining me here today. My pleasure. So we've been talking about Rory's research on this book, The Citadel of the Saxons, The Rise of Early London, which is published by Bloomsbury. And, Roy, you're on social media, aren't you, if people want to hear more from you and follow you on Twitter, I think.

I am indeed, yes, yes. Yes, so do search for Rory Naismith on Twitter. And that brings me to the end of today's episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you have enjoyed listening to this episode, please do tell your friends and family and colleagues about us because it really helps us spread the word. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman, and I will be back again with another episode next Tuesday. Don't miss my co-host, Matt Lewis, who will bring you more of his excellent episodes every Saturday. And thank you for listening and have a great week.