Viking London. Thomas Williams
northern sailors once roamed.
The waterfront was further north than it is today, free from the brick and concrete accretions of later centuries that have squeezed the river into an ever-narrowing channel. But even in the eighth century the river’s edge was being adapted to human purposes. Fragments of the Anglo-Saxon waterfront have been found near Charing Cross station and Buckingham Street, running from 18–20 York Buildings towards Somerset House, skirting the north edge of Victoria Embankment Gardens. Here the foreshore was embanked with wooden and wattle revetments, creating an artificial timber floor which boats could be brought alongside and goods unloaded on to, and where much of the trade and barter probably took place. This timbered shoreline was the true heart of Lundenwic, a pulsing valve through which people, goods and silver passed back and forth along the water.
Between the Strand and Oxford Street, the other main roads of Lundenwic seem largely to have served as access to and from the waterfront. For the most part these are known from short fragmentary stretches of gravel highway that have been uncovered archaeologically or are inferred from the orientation of buildings. Drury Lane and St Martin’s Lane both seem to have been originally laid out in the seventh century as Lundenwic developed, and another north–south route probably ran from Charing Cross to Westminster, and north towards Oxford Street (the Silchester Road). The lines of these roads probably corresponded fairly closely to their modern counterparts, and can be traced in the earliest Tudor maps.
Elsewhere, excavations have produced evidence of narrow gravel lanes, running towards and parallel with the river, lined by rectilinear buildings and ditches laid out in a way that implies a regular street plan: little streets at right angles to each other, the dwellings and workshops of the townspeople set out in tidy rows. At the site of the Royal Opera House, at Maiden Lane and Exeter Street, at 36 King Street and 28–30 James Street and tucked at the north-eastern corner of Covent Garden square itself, the paths and holloways of the Anglo-Saxon settlement carved and crossed, etched into the clay by the footfall of people and beasts, the passage of carts and goods, the flow of games and fights and dancing. Passers-by would have drifted across the fronts of rectangular timber houses, many (though not all) with their gable-ends flush to the roadside, doors opening into rutted filth and stagnant water, mud, gravel and dung. Others were accessed from the long side, from narrow footpaths through yards that stank with refuse and the shit of cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and humans. There were gardens and animals, fences and outhouses, workshops and fruit trees and forges – a humming community of men, women, children and creatures.
Around a hundred buildings have been discovered in Lundenwic, not all of them active at the same time (many were built on top of the remains of others, making the job of archaeologists harder than it would otherwise be, obscuring and confusing the sequence of habitation at particular locations). The average size of a dwelling or workshop was approximately forty feet long and eighteen feet wide – not palatial by any means, although a cash buyer for that sort of square footage in Covent Garden today would have to be a multi-millionaire. Buildings were timber-framed and single-storey, with walls of wattle and daub and roofs of thatch or oaken shingles; they were heated by rectangular floor-hearths or round ovens, and lit by ceramic oil-lamps and candles. Doors swung on iron hinges and were secured with iron bolts. It was in these buildings – whether homes or workshops or both – that the craftsmen and women of Lundenwic worked.
One of the things that seems to have attracted foreign traders to Lundenwic (and other English wics) was worked textile: cloth – both linen and wool – was not merely exchanged at London’s market, but was also made there. The evidence can be found across Lundenwic. Finds of spindle whorls and loom weights in considerable numbers imply a substantial output, a craft industry that supplied textiles to serve personal needs and domestic markets as well as to meet a demand for high-quality exports. Particular concentrations of evidence for weaving have been found at two sites that lie on the line of Drury Lane (55–57 Drury Lane and Bruce House at 1 Kemble Street), and at a location in Covent Garden on the edge of Lundenwic, bounded by Shorts Garden, Earlham Street and Neal Street – a stone’s throw from Seven Dials.
That Anglo-Saxon cloth was prized on the continent is confirmed by the contents of an extraordinary letter of 796 from Charlemagne (at that time king of the Franks and the Lombards) to King Offa. Evidently, Offa had grumbled about the size of imported quern-stones – used primarily for grinding cereals – as well as some issues concerning the treatment of merchants. Charlemagne responds:
Now about those black quern-stones you wanted; you had better send a guy over here to tell us what sort of thing you want; then we can sort that out for you and help with the transport. But since you’ve got into this size issue, I’ve got to tell you that my guys have a thing or two to say about those short cloaks you’ve been sending us. You’re going to have to get your people to make up some cloaks like they used to, bro; you know – like the ones we used to get back in the day … fn6
Anglo-Saxon cloaks were evidently in demand by the Frankish great and good – the longer, apparently, the better.
It wasn’t only weaving that drove the industry of Lundenwic – numerous other crafts were practised in the buildings that once lay between the River Fleet and Tyburn. Antler and bone were turned into combs in workshops where the Royal Opera House extension now stands, quiet work that would have been disturbed by the skriking of hammers from the smithies nearby. Glass was worked and leather was punched, wood was shaped and animals were butchered. What the inhabitants could not produce was brought in from further afield – animal produce from farms outside the settlement, fish caught downriver in the estuary, wine brought from overseas, figs from the Mediterranean, quern-stones from the Rhineland.
All the evidence suggests that Lundenwic in the eighth century was a lively, prosperous place where people lived in relative comfort. They ate bacon and drank ale, munched on apples and warmed their heels by flaming hearths in winter. They crafted day-to-day objects, wove cloth and farmed produce, and presumably took good money and – more often – goods in exchange from the foreign traders who trod the timber embankments beside the Strand. It was a place stocked with humans, young and hale, and animals good for work and food and riding; a place that might well have presented an attractive target to the ruthless and the bold.
Although most of the sailors whose boats arrived at the Strand from overseas would have been Franks or Frisians, it is very likely that Scandinavians were also regular visitors to Lundenwic’s markets. Familiarity may well have spurred the raids on Lundenwic and other North Sea emporia – the Vikings already knew of the wealth to be found in such places, and if they hadn’t been there themselves, they had heard about it from others – from friends and kinsmen, from Frisian traders, from chattering monks bound for slavery. Some, perhaps, hawking their wares on the Strand and filling their shallow-keeled ships with good Lundenwic cloth, had made cold calculation even as they bartered: of profits to be made from ships filled with stolen silver, of slaves taken at the sword’s edge – the risk of death weighed against the reward of plunder.
If they did, and if the raid of 842 was truly the first of its kind, then they had left it very late to roll the die. By the mid-ninth century, Lundenwic was a shadow of what it had been in the eighth century. Occupation seems to have come to an end in many parts of the settlement, and while activity continued it was no longer as coherent or as wealthy as it had been; it was fragmented, knots of buildings and associated smallholdings scattered over the site of Lundenwic, separated by wasteland and punctuated with rubbish pits. Serious fires had taken a toll – in 764, 798 and 801 – but there should be little doubt that Viking raids were largely responsible for the severe economic malaise that settled in the first half of the ninth century. This is not to say that Lundenwic was no longer important. It was clearly important enough to call down the Viking raid of 842, and a hoard of 250 coins buried around the same time (and possibly related to the Viking threat) stands testament to the wealth that still flowed through the settlement.fn7 Substantial ninth-century ditches, dug at Maiden Lane and the Royal Opera House, bear witness to both a heightened sense of danger and to the continued presence of something in the region of Covent Garden that was worth labouring to protect. Nevertheless, a lack of security depresses economic growth and investment – as true then as it is now – and the risk to places accessible by water was only growing stronger.
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