Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London (2 page)

O
pposite Cannon Street station in the City of London is a small stone behind an iron grille set into the wall of 111, Cannon Street. Until recently the premises were occupied by a Chinese bank; now they are home to a sportswear store. The London Stone is easily overlooked by the casual pedestrian but this piece of limestone is at the centre of the legends which surround the creation of London. It is also known as the Brutus Stone and according to legend it was placed in London by a prince of Trojan descent called Brutus (no relation to Julius Caesar’s assassin) who fled from Troy at the end of the Trojan War. Brutus’s arrival is given as 1074 BC (about the time of the likely date of the destruction of Troy). He brought with him his followers – known as Brutons or Britons – and founded the city of New Troy on the north bank of the Thames. To establish his new kingdom Brutus and his followers had to defeat a race of giants led by Gog and Magog who appear in Christian, Jewish and Islamic literature and who have since come to be associated with the defence of the City.

One of Brutus’s successors as ruler of the kingdom of the Britons was King Lud who decided to rename the city after himself as Lud’s Town, soon to be shortened to London, and Londinium upon the Roman occupation. By the 11th century Brutus’s London stone had given its name to a district of the City, marked on maps as Londenstane. The location is recorded in the name of the first mayor of London in 1192, one Henry Fitzailwyn de Londenstane. By that time it was believed that the stone had been used by the Romans as a point from which to measure distances in miles throughout the Roman province of Britain settled in AD 43. This is plausible since the site of the stone was close to the Roman governor’s palace and to Roman roads such as Watling Street (the present A5).

Many other legends have become attached to the stone during its long history. The poet William Blake identified it as a place of ritual sacrifice, associated with the Druids. It is one of many stones which are claimed as being that from which King Arthur drew Excalibur. It became enshrined in the history and literature of the City so that possession of the stone came to be associated with possession of the City itself. In Shakespeare’s play
King Henry VI, Part II
the rebel Jack Cade, calling himself John Mortimer, enters the stage, strikes his staff on London stone and declares:

Now is Mortimer lord of this city. And here, sitting upon London stone,I charge and command that, of the city’s cost, the pissing conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our reign.

This event occurred in 1450. Jack Cade’s head soon found itself on a spike on London Bridge but the stone survived. The stone was a place where deals were made, oaths sworn and rituals enacted for hundreds of years. The Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers, a City livery company which received its royal charter in 1629, was entrusted with checking the quality of spectacles made. Any found to be defective suffered the fate recorded in a document of 1671: ‘broken, defaced and spoyled both glasse and frame the which judgement was executed accordingly in Canning [Cannon] Street on the remayning part of London Stone where the same were with a hammer broken in all pieces’.

The stone has been moved several times. It survived the Great Fire of 1666 and was set into the wall of one of Sir Christopher Wren’s finest churches, St Swithin’s. The church was destroyed by bombing in 1941 but the stone survived unscathed and was moved to its present position. Like the ravens of the Tower of London the stone’s safety is linked to that of the City, an ancient myth claiming that ‘So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish.’ The stone itself is a Grade II* listed structure and, almost inevitably, a nearby pub is named after it.

T
he Romans occupied London in AD 43 and left in 410 but traces of their occupation linger. Remains of an amphitheatre have been found in front of the Guildhall and the shape of the structure is marked in granite stones in the forecourt. Leadenhall Market, off Gracechurch Street, stands on the site of the Roman basilica. In 1954 the remains of a Temple of Mithras were found in the vicinity of Walbrook, dating from the time of the Roman occupation and devoted to a Persian deity. The artefacts are on show at the Museum of London and a reconstruction of the temple’s foundations has been created at 11, Queen Victoria Street, close to the original excavation site. The most conspicuous remnant of Roman London is the Roman Wall which was built of Kentish ragstone brought by barge from the Medway and up the Thames.

Roman amphitheatre

The Roman Wall enclosed an area rather less than the ‘Square Mile’ of the medieval city. It was 6-9 feet wide and about 18 feet high, protected by a deep ditch. Parts of the wall may still be seen, notably those at Tower Hill, just outside the Underground station and those close to St Giles’s Church, Cripplegate. Passage through the wall was through a number of gates which were usually closed at sunset.

N
one of the original Roman or medieval gates through the City Wall may still be seen though their names are commemorated in many street and station names, all of them post-Roman. It is not even certain when the gates were built. Each consisted of a gap in the wall, usually protected by a portcullis and a fortified tower which, like that at Newgate, could also be used as a prison. These towers were often used to display portions of the dismembered corpses of criminals, especially traitors. Beginning at the north-west of the City and working clockwise the first was Aldersgate which led onto Watling Street. It was certainly built by the Romans though it takes its name from a later Saxon noble called Ealdred. Next is Cripplegate, also Roman, giving access to a substantial Roman fort sited at this point. The true origin of its name is now obscure but may derive from a legend that some cripples were miraculously cured when the body of King Edmund the Martyr (who gave his name to the town of Bury St Edmund’s in Suffolk) passed through it after his death at the hands of marauding Danes in 870.

Newgate

The first medieval gate we encounter is Moorgate built in 1415 by a mercer called Thomas Falconer to give access to the marshy fields (‘Moorfields’) just beyond the city walls. Bishopsgate is Roman, leading onto Ermine Street though it took its name from a bishop of London who rebuilt it in the 7th century. The Roman-built Aldgate (Anglo-Saxon for ‘Old Gate’) led to the east towards Colchester, at one time the Roman capital. For a while the gatehouse was the home of Geoffrey Chaucer and his family when he worked as a collector of customs. In 1381 he watched the Essex men of the Peasants’ Revolt as they passed through on their way to their fateful encounter at Smithfield where their leader, Wat Tyler, was stabbed by the Mayor of London, William Walworth, and the rebels dispersed.

Next, the 13th-century Postern Gate may still be seen close to the Tower of London; it remained in use until the 17th century. Nearby of course is the notorious Traitor’s Gate, an entrance to the Tower from the river, built in 1279 during the reign of Edward I. It owes its name to the practice of ferrying condemned prisoners from trial in Westminster Hall to the Tower prior to their execution on Tower Hill. Billingsgate, which was a Thames wharf for fishermen, probably owes it name to a prominent local landowner. The famous fish market is first recorded in tolls regulations of 1016. The market itself moved to Docklands in 1982. There was at one time a Bridgegate which gave access to London Bridge but lay at the southern end of the bridge in Southwark as a defence against attack from that direction. Dowgate, another water gate, stood at the point where the little River Walbrook enters the Thames.