Londinium

(later Augusta, now London) near the Tamesis (Thames) in Britannia (England)

Bronze Age pottery has been discovered near St. Paul's Cathedral (belonging to a farmstead or hamlet), though otherwise evidence for pre-Roman occupation is scanty. But the site interested the Romans at an early date because it lay at the lowest point of the Thames which was reachable by land transport from the major British harbors and by ships from the ports of Gaul, and it was also at the lowest point at which a harbor and a bridge could be constructed. Whether Julius Casear crossed the Thames here in 54 BC remains conjectural, but Romans arrived on the site not long after the beginnings of the invasion of Aulus Plautius in AD 43: they were probably engaged in pursuit of King Caratacus of the Catuvellauni after his defeat in the area of Durobrivae (Rochester). Flat semi-marshland extended for up to half a mile alongside the Thames, but on the north bank there were several low, flat-topped hills divided by tributaries such as the Fleet and the Walbrook.

Aulus Plautius, while awaiting the arrival of the emperor, presumably established a fort, which recent archaeological evidence tentatively locates in the Westminster area. A ford may have been used there, and it seems very possible that the town itself was in existence by c 50. Southwark, on the other side, was early developed as a suburb.

Tacitus reports that when Boudicca, queen of the Iceni in East Anglia, sacked Londinium in 60, the place had already become an important and populous trading center, the meeting point of roads to the north (known to the Saxons as Ermine Street), northeast, northwest and west. Probably, too, it had become, or soon became, the headquarters of the financial chiefs (procurators) of the province, since in the early sixties one of them, Julius Classicianus, who had died in office, was buried at Londinium. The town seems to have been created a municipium by the time of Hadrian (117–38), and subsequently became an honorary colony. Moreover, by the second century, if not earlier, it was the capital of the province, and subsequently, after the reorganization of Septimius Severus (193–211), it remained the capital of the new province of Britannia Superior. A town wall—apparently the first—was built of Kentish ragstone in the early third century, enclosing an area which made Londinium the fifth-largest town in the west. The usurpers Carausius (287–93) and Allectus (293–96) issued coinage at its mint, and Constantius I Chlorus, who destroyed this secessionist state, depicted the gate and a kneeling personification of the city on gold medallions commemorating his victorious entry.

During the early fourth century, Londinium became the capital of Maxima Caesariensis—one of the four (later five) provinces into which the former Britannia was now divided—and was the seat of the governor-general (vicarius) of those provinces; a Christian bishop, too, is recorded at the Council of Arelate (314). Coinage continued to be issued at its mint until c 325, and was resumed by the pretender Magnus Maximus (383–88), whose issues described the city as Augusta, a designation it had received earlier in the century (perhaps together with the conferment of colonial rank).

From the later fourth century onward, however, very little is known of Londinium; but it would appear that, despite the construction of new fortifications in the 390s (recently discovered), its surviving population shrank considerably. When three further usurpers briefly controlled Britain between 406 and 411, and the last of them, Constantine III, withdrew its remaining garrison to the continent, Londinium may have called in German mercenaries to settle in the city and assist in its defence. Not long afterward, however, the organization of its town life had apparently declined into a haphazard day-by-day existence, in which a semirural farming population occupied the shell of the city—changing gradually from a Roman to a Saxon culture—and homeless squatters lived in the abandoned rooms of what had once been elegant houses.

The earliest buildings of Londinium were almost all of clay and timber, and burned easily when set alight by Boudicca. A first bridge lay six hundred yards upstream from London Bridge, beside an openwork landing stage; the site of the landing stage north of Thames Street, and beneath it, has been investigated. A timber and stone courtyard building is dated to c 75 by tree-ring analysis of its oak piles, and the same epoch witnessed the erection of a governor's palace (?) in Cannon Street, in addition to a stone fort (Cripplegate) and public baths (Higgin Hill). Wooden tablets bear witness to the activities of the provincial finance officer (procurator), and illustrate the commercial life of the city, which included the importation and distribution of Gaulish terracotta and Rhineland glass.

Many of the buildings of Londinium were destroyed in a serious fire during the reign of Hadrian (c 120–30). From his reign (not thirty years earlier, as had been supposed) dates the forum on the summit of Cornhill. A massive oak-based quay (New Fresh Wharf) of late second century date has been found to have replaced the earlier landing stage. A temple of Mithras, built near the east bank of the Walbrook (near the Mansion House) has yielded important marble sculptures—including heads of Serapis and Minerva and statues of Mercury, Bacchus and Pan—which were probably buried in the time of Constantine I the Great (306–37), amid fears of Christian persecution. A large bath structure in lower Thames Street formed part of a private residence (c 200). A rubbish pit of about the same date at Southwark has yielded the remains of four hundred and fifty-two animals (of which twenty per cent are non-domesticated red deer, roe deer, hare, wild boar, badger and woodcock), and another pit has yielded traces of fourteen fruits and vegetables.