Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Thomas Williams 2019

Cover art by Joe McLaren

Maps by Martin Brown

Thomas Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008299866

Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008299873

Version: 2019-05-14

Dedication

For Pru

Many thanks are due to Dr Rory Naismith (King’s College London), Professor Andrew Reynolds (UCL) and Dr Gareth Williams and my other friends and former colleagues at the British Museum for their help, advice and good cheer. I am also grateful to my editors at William Collins and to Julian Alexander and Ben Clark at the Soho Agency for all of their assistance. The support of my family has been critical to the successful completion of this project. I owe a particular debt to my father, for – amongst other things – his patient and insightful reading of this manuscript as it evolved over several versions. I thank him for his indefatigability. I take responsibility for any errors that remain; idiosyncrasies and neologisms are, however, probably deliberate.

Epigraph

The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea […] Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Introduction

I Lundenwic

II Lundenburh

III Lundúnir

IV Lundúnaborg

V Vikings Drink Tea

Footnotes

Notes

Notes, sources and further reading

Abbreviations

Index

About the Author

Also by Thomas Williams

About the Publisher

Maps

Introduction

Wherever their ships ploughed the water, the Vikings made needles of rivers: a hypodermic rush of systemic devastation and steroidal vigour, wracking the veins of nations with the germ of change. In Dublin, York and Kiev, Iceland, Normandy and Russia, the Vikings planted the seeds of new realms and great cities, stoking the furnaces of trade, technology and industry wherever their keels ground the shingle and markets echoed with the jangle of slave-chains. They remoulded the world for ever, violence and commerce riding the whale-road from the north: twin sea-stallions of the Viking Age. In Britain the impact was profound: the Vikings remade the geopolitical map, changed the language, up-ended the dynamics of power and trade. Monasteries and settlements burned, ancient dynasties were extinguished. And nowhere in these islands was subjected to more aggression than London.

Between 842 and 1016 London was assaulted by Vikings on at least a dozen separate occasions. Sometimes it burned and sometimes it surrendered, mostly it stood firm when all others had given up hope; and throughout it all the city endured, remaking and remodelling itself, growing strong in adversity, unique in economic power, a crucible of cultures, enterprise and political intrigue: a maker of kings, the heart of a North Sea empire. This book is a sketch of London in the Viking Age, how it remade itself, how it was transformed by immigrants and natives, kings and commoners into the fulcrum of national power and identity. London emerged as a hub of trade, production and international exchange, a financial centre, a political prize, a fiercely independent and often intractable cauldron of spirited and rowdy townsfolk: a place that, a thousand years ago, already embodied much of what London was to become and still remains.

This book is also, however, a confrontation with the city that still sprawls beside the Thames – a delving into its darkest age, an invasion of its privy parts.

Viking Age London is like an old wound, seemingly long healed and oft forgotten. But sometimes in the winter, when a cold wind blows from the north, it still nags – an ache that will never go away. Stumbling around corners, feet catch on stitches, pull back the skin of modernity – an ancient street name hidden beneath a concrete underpass, a paved void where a church no longer stands, a stretch of the old riverbank crawling out from beneath embankments. For nothing is lost in the city: things just sink further into the mire, deeper into time.

Occasionally, however, those memories break free, bursting upward like the hands of hungry corpses, or shimmering wraith-like through the alluvium. They hover like a miasma in the crypts of old churches or the depths of museum collections, drifting amongst beer cans at the blood-coloured foot of London Wall or blowing across the mud and shingle on the Thames foreshore. In these places the ghosts of Viking London still assemble, the murmur of liðsmen mingling with the banter of Victorian antiquarians, the chatter of tourists, the profanities of drunks. London is a city of spectres, of ghosts walking in the footsteps of other ghosts, and the Viking Age is perhaps its most forgotten hinterland.

And through it all runs the river, that titanic, oily-backed serpent. It winds its monstrous coils through Viking London – through time and place, providing and devouring, poisoning and fattening – before unravelling, unbound, into a mess of estuarine chaos, its mighty body dissolving to the sea.

I
Lundenwic

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that in the year 842 ‘there was a great slaughter in London and in Quentovic and in Rochester’.¹ In an entry for the same year, the Annals of St Bertin, a chronicle compiled in what is now northern France, describes the raid on Quentovic, a trading centre just across the Channel, and names the antagonists as ‘northmen’.² The Vikings had come to London.

By the 840s Viking raids had been a feature of British life for around half a century. The first raids occurred in Wessex and Northumbria at the end of the eighth century, but from the 830s onward Viking fleets had grown larger and the threat they posed more serious. West Saxon kings had faced Viking armies in pitched battle on a number of occasions; the king of Northumbria lost his life to a Viking raiding army in 844. The earliest raid on London that we know of is that of 842, but it was not necessarily the first. Fifty years earlier, in 792, King Offa of Mercia – the Midland realm that at the time was the most powerful kingdom in southern Britain – had a charter drawn up confirming the exemption of Kentish churches from various obligations that landholders normally owed to their royal overlords. It is an important document that helps to confirm that Offa was, at this stage, firmly in charge of south-east England. Some of the most interesting aspects of the charter, however, are the exceptions made for things that the churches of Kent were still obliged to finance – in particular, ‘an expedition within Kent against seaborne pagans arriving with fleets, or against the East Saxons if necessity compels, as well as bridge and fortress work in Canterbury to see the pagans off’.³

Put simply, the Church still had to pay for defences against pagan raids from the sea, and it seems clear from this that Vikings were already threatening the southern shores of Britain in Offa’s day. It also follows that there were many incidents of violence, destruction and theft which have left no trace in the written record. That does not necessarily mean that London had been targeted by earlier Viking raids, but it could well have been. The threat, at least, had been alive for more than half a century.

But even if it had suffered no Viking aggression, London would have been no strange port to Scandinavian mariners. Writing in the early eighth century, Bede famously described ‘the city of London, which stands on the banks of the Thames, and is a trading centre for many nations who visit it by land and sea’.⁴ His thumbnail sketch of a great international emporium is borne out by archaeological evidence found at various places around London’s West End suggestive of a thriving trade with the Frankish realms and Frisia via their own respective trading sites at Quentovic and Dorestad.fn1 Some of the imports came from further afield – pottery and quern-stones from the Rhineland, figs from southern Europe – and there may have been direct contact with Ribe in Denmark and, by the eighth century, with new trading ports at Kaupang (Norway), Birka (Sweden) and Hedeby (now in northern Germany).

London’s success as a trading centre was bound to the river. From the Rhine estuary, a westward journey pointed straight down the barrel of the Thames. From there the river was a navigable conduit deep into the west of Britain, with the city functioning as the gateway – an entrepôt squatting at the hub of an overland travel network worn into the earth by millennia of falling feet. It was this location that had made London – Londinium – the de facto capital of the province of Britannia for most of the first two centuries of Roman rule in Britain.fn2 Roman technology and organization had turned the trackways into an extensive and well-maintained network of roads, connecting the city with the farthest-flung reaches of the province. Over time, Londinium developed the trappings of a great imperial city: a mighty stone basilica, around 560 feet in length and three storeys high; a seven-thousand-seat amphitheatre; an elaborate temple to Mithras; an imposing governor’s palace complex; a vast circuit of enclosing walls that roughly encompassed the modern City of London, from Aldgate in the west to the Tower in the east, from Moorgate and Barbican in the north to the river in the south, its river wall skirting the edge of the water.

Surviving stretches of Roman wall can still be found in a handful of places, most in the north of the city, imperfectly commemorated in the stretch of road known as London Wall. Turning south onto Noble Street, a stretch of the old masonry can be found submerged in a deep trench, cutting a long rift down the western limb of the road, below the cliffs of glass and steel and pale brick that rise above. The stone is red and raw against the cold sterility of the modern City of London, a livid ridge of muscle exposed where the urban skin has been pulled away by dissecting hands, archaeology as anatomy. A few yards away to the north, a church once stood close to the wall; another wound, this time healed over like a scar, sealed but not forgotten, a sad rectangle of brown brickwork and grass where St Olave Silver Street once stood. First mentioned in the twelfth century, the church was dedicated to a Norwegian warrior-king who died in 1030 – one of several such churches that stud the city.

Like so much of old London, St Olave Silver Street was obliterated by the Great Fire in 1666. Worse was to come, of course. During the 1940s, the war brought unprecedented damage to the body of the city. And what the incendiary bombs failed to claim, the planners and architects of subsequent decades took instead, replacing the surviving fabric with an urban landscape of brutal modernity. Around London Wall the dystopian ramparts of the Barbican Centre rise, grey walkways and balconies, stairwells and underpasses, cold light and hard shadows – a dream of how the future used to look, filtered through the cathode-ray tube and the comic-book pages of 2000AD: all cyberpunk visions, block-wars and ultraviolence.

It is into this world that the Roman wall runs, its broken towers and bulwarks dwarfed by concrete parapets, corralled into a narrow municipal green space that snakes around the side of the Museum of London. The museum is the final repository for much of the reclaimed detritus of London’s many pasts, its Viking Age included. There the recaptured fugitives of lost centuries are confined, trapped uncomfortably by the museum’s awkward modernity. Time has dulled the building’s once-cutting edge, exposing the built-in obsolescence laid by architectural vanity. The collection is now due to move to the covered market at Smithfield, an elegant and functional space that the self-conscious idiosyncrasies of the Barbican Centre could never have accommodated. It is ironic that, in their flight from failed modernity, the relics of London’s past have (one hopes) effected the rescue of the Victorian former meat market from the bulldozer – the General Market Building, designed by the architect Horace Jones and completed in 1883, had at one stage been doomed for demolition and replacement by a seven-storey office block.

The eeriness of lost pasts and failed futures can be felt everywhere in London. The old, the buried and the mutilated jostle uneasily with the weird, the obsolete and the hyper-modern, leaving the humans that pass in their shadows or tramp over their remains to experience a queer haunting – a nostalgia for the past and for those things that never were, for the futures that were foreclosed or failed to deliver on the promises of their architects; it gives rise to both the city’s strange charm and its capacity to unnerve, an arresting ugliness born of a chaotic cycle of trauma, healing and failure, abandonment, recovery and decay. It has been this way since Boudicca massacred the young town’s inhabitants and burned it to the ground in the year 60 or 61, and it is, perhaps, the reason why the Anglo-Saxons reacted to London’s ruins in the confused ways in which they did – both repelled and fascinated.

For the literate elite, Roman settlements retained an allure of sorts: a memory of former grandeur, of their status as bastions of imperial power and burgeoning Christian hierarchy – suitable settings for the renewal and preservation of faith. At Lincoln, for example, the church of St Paul-in-the-Bail – situated within the old Roman precincts – can be dated to the seventh century, and the town may have retained significance as the seat of a bishop – an oasis of relative civilization amongst the ruins. Things took a similar course within the walls of Londinium, where ideas of Romanitas guided the aspirations of bishops, popes and kings. The original church of St Paul’s was founded – according to Bede – in 604. It was constructed for Mellitus, its first incumbent bishop, an Italian who had travelled to Britain with Augustine’s fateful mission to convert the English to Christianity.⁵ Writing to Augustine from Rome, Pope Gregory I had expressed his desire that London should become the primary see of a revived Britannia, the capital of a province restored to the Christian Imperium that he envisaged: an Empire of Christ with Rome at its heart and Britannia at its periphery on the new frontier of Roman Christendom.⁶

Political realities in Britain interfered with Gregory’s vision. When Mellitus was eventually installed at London, it was as a bishop subordinate to the archdiocese of Canterbury. The real power in southern Britain was King Æthelberht of Kent (with the apparent acquiescence of his nephew Sæberht, king of Essex). Æthelberht was quite content for his own trading emporium at Canterbury to remain the pre-eminent centre of Roman Christianity in Britain (Augustine himself had been recognized as the first archbishop of Canterbury in 597). Nevertheless, the symbolic importance of London had been recognized, and the church of St Paul’s was duly built within the walls. No trace of the original building survives, no indication of its size or grandeur, nor even whether it was raised in stone or timber; but somewhere below the vast hulk of Wren’s cathedral, down through the remnants of the great gothic building that burned in 1666, some shattered trace of that Saxon church may yet lie.

Mellitus did not have long to enjoy his episcopal power. When Kings Æthelberht and Sæberht both died in 616–17, the former was replaced by his son Eadbald, and the latter by his own three sons: Sæward, Seaxred and Seaxbald. Unfortunately for Mellitus, all of these men were initially unenthusiastic about the whole idea of Christianity. The sons of Sæberht kicked Bishop Mellitus out of London, and King Eadbald promptly kicked him out of the country. When Eadbald eventually revised his religious opinions and allowed Mellitus to return to Kent in 618–19, the bishop discovered that Kentish royal power had found its limits. Returning to London to resume his ministry, he must have been dismayed to find that its townspeople were not at all pleased to have him back, preferring – as Bede put it – ‘their own idolatrous priests’. Faced with the ‘refusal and resistance’ of London’s defiantly pagan townsfolk (backed, we must assume, by the recalcitrant heathen princes of Essex), both Kentish king and Church of Rome were rendered powerless.⁷ Armed with enviable geopolitical advantages, the townsfolk did what generations of Londoners have done ever since: they slammed shut the (probably metaphorical) gates and told the bishop to bugger off.fn3

These anecdotes comprise the earliest written mentions of London in the early Middle Ages, and introduce themes that run throughout the city’s history. Poised between kingdoms – Kent and Essex, East Anglia and Mercia, Wessex and, later, the ‘Danelaw’ – early medieval London was able to routinely exploit the political tensions that ran through and focused on the city. This position at the convergence of frontiers, on the fault lines of effective authority, enabled London to grow prosperous. It could be a meeting place and a bargaining chip, a market place, a hub for intrigue, a centre of international commerce. Its liminality also fostered a sense of independence amongst the city’s populace – a belligerence and bloody-mindedness that would, over the centuries, manifest itself repeatedly in the teeth of unwelcome demands and unwanted guests. The same attributes, however, would also make the city desirable – an economic and political prize worth any amount of blood and treasure to capture or defend.

That desire for the city – the urge to possess it, to exploit it, to wield authority within and from it – had revealed itself from the beginning as an animating force. It was not, as the story of Mellitus reveals, a desire founded solely in worldly ambitions and practicalities. Of all the former imperial cities of Britannia it was Londinium that Pope Gregory had imagined should form the head of a new Christian province. It was a romantic vision, an image of the Roman Empire reborn as a great commonwealth of faith with Rome at its heart. In that vision, the old cities and provincial capitals would rise from chaos as beacons of religion, learning and orderly government – miniature reflections of the heavenly Jerusalem. This dream of restored empire, fluttering in the breasts of kings and ecclesiarchs, would keep London’s weak pulse beating throughout the darkest years of its decay – an image that would sustain it in the minds of those whose deeds would shape its destiny in the years ahead. Two centuries after Mellitus, London remained, in the words of a charter of King Coenwulf of Mercia, ‘a famous place and a royal town’.⁸

Yet when those words were written in 811 – and thirty-one years later, when Viking ships sailed past the walls in 842 – the ruins of Londinium had still not been reclaimed. Rotting beside the Thames for more than four centuries, the walls were the relics of a world as far removed from the Viking Age as the Renaissance is from our own. The sight of them may have been something of a novelty for people hailing from lands that had never been yoked to Rome; it might have seemed to them – as it had to the Anglo-Saxons – a ghost town, filled with the shades of fallen empires. The wilful neglect, avoidance even, of the old city of Londinium, indeed of most Roman urban settlements in Britain, is one of the great puzzles of the early Anglo-Saxon period. Some of this reluctance to make use of the old urban environment was no doubt informed by practicality – Londinium’s river wall was not very conducive to water-borne trade, and the repair and maintenance of masonry buildings required specialist skills and materials that were hard to acquire. But as a blanket explanation for a widespread phenomenon, this sort of functionalist reasoning feels unduly reductive – and not a little patronizing. Even the rudest of fantasy barbarians could surely find the wherewithal to balance stones one atop the other – or to demolish them when they got in the way.

In truth, the Anglo-Saxons possessed a deep intellectual and emotional sophistication, a clear capacity to make philosophical and aesthetic choices untethered from base economic calculation and utilitarianism. Their imaginative world was rich and complex, their poetry tightly structured yet poignant – sparsely drawn but deeply allusive. Like a bright spring bubbling from the mountain rock, the glittering stream of verse speaks of worlds unseen, of vast caverns and subterranean rivers flowing with forgotten myths and half-remembered pasts.

Well-wrought this wall-stone, weird broke it;

Bastions busted, burst is giant’s work.

Roofs are ruined, ruptured turrets,

Ring-gate broken, rime on lime-work,

Cloven shower-shields, sheered, fallen,

Age ate under them. Earth-grasp holds fast

The noble workers, decayed, departed

in earth’s hard-grip, while a hundred times

the generations pass.⁹

The Ruin, the Old English poem from which the lines above are translated, describes the remains of a Roman city. The poet here has turned the experience of living amongst ruins into an elegiac romanticism weighed down with fate – what the English knew as wyrd (‘weird’) and the Norse as urðr; it was a sense, shared amongst the peoples of northern Europe, that all roads led inevitably into darkness – ‘that all glory’, as Tolkien put it, ‘ends in night’.¹⁰

The environments that played host to these great turnings of the cosmic wheel were therefore not happy places, not conducive to the building of bright futures. The ruin and decay was a reminder of failure and hubris, of the striking hand of fate and the erasures of history, haunted by the workings of time and by the memories of giants. It is for these reasons, as much as for any practical purpose, that the former Roman cities of Britain were shunned. In Londinium, only the small area around St Paul’s seems to have remained in use at all, the rest of the city crumbling, filth-strewn and insect-infested. Some of the clearest evidence for a human presence has been found in the shape of two strange corpses, two women of the eighth century whose bodies were disposed of in bizarre circumstances near Bull Wharf, between the river and the walls. The first had died a violent death – her head smashed in with a weapon or a tool, laid on a bed of reeds, covered with moss, enclosed in tree bark, surrounded by wooden stakes. This was not normal. Fifteen feet away another woman lay buried in a narrow grave; a more conventional burial, but still – in its location, its isolation, its association with the weird – a deviation from Anglo-Saxon normality. These corpses speak to us of the ways in which the old city was regarded: as a fitting place for aberration, as a harbour for the dangerous, uncanny dead.

The place that the Vikings had come to pillage in 842 was not the walled Roman city but a new town that had sprung up to the west. Known to the locals as ‘Lundenwic’, it was an Anglo-Saxon market place of timber homes, workshops and jetties, sprawling along the shoreline of the Thames from what is now the eastern edge of Trafalgar Square to somewhere in the region of St Clement Danes (near Aldwych). It was one of a number of contemporary settlements – including Hamwic (Southampton), Gipeswic (Ipswich) and Eoforwic (York) – that were focused on servicing trade and manufactured goods (the word wic is derived from the Latin vicus, a settlement that lacked some of the essentials for a true town in the Roman sense). Lundenwic had grown up in the late seventh century to exploit the opportunities afforded by the river and its easy access to the broader waterways of the Channel and beyond, as well as the overland routes and access to the British interior that the Romans had recognized long ago in situating their own city. Lundenwic – to borrow once more from Tolkien – was Lake Town to Londinium’s Dale: a wooden market town erected in the long shadow of its shattered stone forebear, awed by the splendour of its predecessor’s memory but haunted by its doom.

There are no maps of Lundenwic. There are, in fact, no maps of London at all before the sixteenth century. What we understand of the Anglo-Saxon street plan can only be pieced together from fragmentary mentions of roads and boundaries, from the road-names and the street plan of later periods, and from archaeology. The settlement occupied an area between two Roman roads that ran from east to west – one at the southern edge of the settlement and the other a few hundred yards north of it. They were already centuries old by the time of King Offa (r.757–96). The northern route is still followed by the line of what is now Oxford Street and High Holborn. Originally the Roman road to Silchester, this was a major highway connecting London to the wider countryside and onwards to the kingdom of Wessex. At what is now Marble Arch, this road crossed the Tyburn Brook and met the junction with Watling Street. From Essex in the east all the way to the west Midlands, Watling Street took travellers from Lundenwic to the heart of Offa’s Mercia. In the tenth century it was still recognized as a national artery of major military significance – a charter of King Edgar (r.959–75), dated to the beginning of his reign, described it as the wide here stræt (‘wide army street’).¹¹

For at least a thousand years, the place we now call Marble Arch – the crossing of Watling Street, the Silchester Road and the Tyburn Brook – has been a potent landmark, a place of communal memory that thrums with ghosts, rough justice and legal assembly. The name of the stream has become synonymous with public hangings: the last execution to take place there (of the highwayman John Austin) was carried out on 3 November 1783. From the Tudor period onward, the gallows was a triple-beamed structure, like a massive wooden version of those odd plastic bits of miniaturized garden furniture one finds in takeaway pizza boxes. Now a strange memorial to the ‘Tyburn Tree’ stands on a traffic island at the junction of Edgware Road and Bayswater Road: three young oak trees, one for each leg of that morbid timber tripod. As these trees grow, their branches will intertwine, tangling with each other into a weird simulacrum of the awful structure that once loomed in their place; roots feeding on tarmac-sealed death, limbs creaking with swinging ghosts.

For the Anglo-Saxons, the crossroads was the location of the Ossulstone (Oswulf’s Stone). This was a mysterious monolith that served as the meeting place of Ossulstone hundred, a regional division of the county of Middlesex that – though it excluded Southwark and the city within the Roman walls – included much of modern London and all of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lundenwic. It marked a place under the open sky for the freemen of the hundred to hear the king’s laws and pronouncements, to discuss and dispute with their peers, to settle grievances and see justice done. In cases of serious wrongdoing, guilt was often determined by the number (and the status) of the ‘oath-helpers’ who would swear to the innocence of the accused. Whilst penalties were not always extreme (most cases were settled by the payment of fines that related to the status of the injured party), the most serious and recalcitrant offenders could pay a high price. Hanging and beheading were the most common means of capital punishment, but burning, drowning and stoning – as well as a range of unpleasant mutilations – were also handed down to the unfortunate.

Today the area is dominated by a different monument, the funereal arch of white marble that was moved to the entrance of Hyde Park in 1851. This great rude hunk of architectural salvage from aborted plans for Buckingham Palace stands self-consciously adrift on its traffic island – unsure of its purpose, unmoored from its surroundings, a baroque obsolescence washed up on the flagstone beaches of the mystifying archipelago that (after the arcane traffic schemes of the 1960s) now lies along the chaotic littoral of London’s West End. Of the original stone monument – Oswulf’s Stone – there is no longer any trace.fn4

For the people of Lundenwic, however, it was the southern road that held the greater everyday importance during the eighth and early ninth centuries. Connecting the Roman walled city (and the church of St Paul’s) with an area of timber-built settlement encompassing what is now Covent Garden and the surrounding environs, the road ran just to the north of the sloping Thames foreshore, overlooking and providing access to the water. Before the twelfth century it was known formally as Akeman Street (Akemannestraet), from the Old English name for Bath (Acemannesceastre), the Roman city where the road terminated its straight-line drive through the western shires of England.¹³ But to the people of Lundenwic, just as to modern Londoners, their local stretch of this great road was almost certainly known by association with the shoreline that it shadowed: the Strand, a word unchanged in sound, form or meaning from the Old English (strand: ‘shoreline’, ‘beach’, ‘bank’).¹⁴

Craven Passage is one of the many crannies that riddle the city behind the grand façades, the modern steel and concrete. These are the mouseholes of history, the places where forgotten vistas and lost walks cling on in the shadows, pattering footsteps and muttered voices caught when the traffic dies away, when the light dims – a stone tape-recording. The Passage, the dingy underbelly of Charing Cross station, is a brick and flagstone vault that bores beneath the platforms of the Victorian station. At its eastern end in the subterranean half-light is the point of egress to Heaven nightclub on Villiers Street, one of the most famous of London’s gay clubs. It was just to the south of this dank underpass – part alleyway, part catacomb – that evidence of the Anglo-Saxon embankment was discovered in 1987: to walk the passage from Northumberland Avenue to Villiers Street is to promenade on the edge of Lundenwic’s waterfront, to jostle with sailors and dock-hands, barrels and slaves. At its western end the passageway emerges into daylight, splitting The Ship & Shovell into two – the only London pub that occupies both sides of a thoroughfare. Just beyond the pub, the passage crosses Craven Street where, left towards where the water once lapped against the Anglo-Saxon boardwalk, Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, lived for two months in 1849 at lodgings in number 25 – a handsome end-of-terrace Georgian house that still stands.

The writing of Moby-Dick probably began almost at the moment that Melville left London; his journal indicates that he had little enough time for writing amidst visits to the British Museum (‘big arm & foot–Rosetta stone–Ninevah sculptures–&c’), antiquarian shopping trips (‘Looked over a lot of ancient maps of London. Bought one (A.D. 1766) for 3 & 6 pence’), meetings with publishers and bouts of general indulgence (‘Porter passed round in tankards. Round table, potatoes in a napkin. Afterwards, Gin, brandy, whiskey & cigars’) – all in all, a fine summation of a writer’s ideal life in London. Ideas for the novel, however, were undoubtedly congealing during his stay in the city.¹⁵ ‘It is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk,’ wrote Melville in 1851 of his masterpiece, ‘but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.’¹⁶fn5 It would no doubt have pleased him, thrilled him maybe, to have known that his lodgings were perched above the Anglo-Saxon waterline, where briny-arsed 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.

In 851 another Viking fleet entered the Thames. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 350 ships slid into the estuary, sacking Canterbury before moving on to London. There are no surviving Viking ships that date to the mid-ninth century. The closest parallel to the vessels that attacked London in 851 is a ship recovered from a burial mound at Gokstad near Oslo in Norway. Constructed in the 890s, the Gokstad ship is a beautiful object, a masterpiece of technology and design. The strakes of its clinker-built hull taper with the smooth curves of living trees up to the razor-edged prow: a sleek and deadly serpent of the waves. Broad enough in the belly for a substantial crew and cargo, but still fast and lethal under sail and oar, the Gokstad ship could have carried around thirty-five rowers, all of whom would probably have been expected to fight. If ships of the fleet that entered the Thames in 851 were of similar size, and if the numbers provided by the Chronicle are accurate, this Viking warband could have fielded up to 12,250 warriors.

This is a large number by any measure, and the reported size of Viking fleets and armies has been repeatedly called into question over the years, with suspicions that the numbers were inflated by monastic writers to heighten the sense of existential danger and to excuse Anglo-Saxon defeats. Nevertheless, it is likely that this was a serious threat. From the 850s onward, the nature of the Viking threat to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had changed. Large forces, bigger than those that had raided the coastline of Britain in previous decades, began to ‘over-winter’ – that is, to set up camp rather than go home over the off-season, maintaining a pattern of raiding and mounting ever more damaging and ambitious campaigns. The raid on London in 851 was effectively the dawn of this grim new day: it is recorded in the same Chronicle entry that ‘for the first time, heathen men settled over the winter’.¹⁹ It also marked the effective end of Lundenwic, both in reality – within a couple of decades the settlement had become archaeologically invisible, covered by a layer of dark earth – and in the minds of near-contemporaries.fn8 According to the retrospective account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in the 890s, the attack of 851 was launched not against Lundenwic, but against Lundenburh: against ‘fortress London’.

II
Lundenburh

In 865, a micel hæðen here (a ‘great heathen horde’) arrived in East Anglia. It was a Viking warband larger than any seen before in Britain, and with extraordinary speed it set about tearing up the geopolitical order, shattering ancient kingdoms the length and breadth of the island: Northumbria (866), East Anglia (870), Alt Clud (870), Mercia (873) – all fell to the conquerors or were transformed out of all recognition. In England, only Wessex remained intact, preserved by good fortune and the fortitude of its rulers.

In 871, returning from Wessex after having been fought to a standstill by Alfred and his brother, King Æthelred, the great heathen horde had made camp at London and remained there over the winter. A hoard of silver found at Croydon can be dated to this period, and may well relate to the comings and goings of Viking warbands from their winter-setl at London. The Mercian King Burgred eventually ‘made peace’ with the Viking army (i.e. paid them off), and they returned to East Anglia. It was to be a short-lived reprieve – the Vikings invaded Mercia in 873, deposing Burgred and driving him into exile. In 878 a different Viking fleet, lately arrived from the continent, made camp at Fulham – then a site to the west of London. It too left after a single winter, travelling to Ghent (in modern Belgium) before rampaging onward into the Frankish kingdom.

There is no record that details activity at either of these camps, and no archaeology to pinpoint their locations or illuminate the day-to-day lives of their temporary inhabitants. ‘It is very difficult,’ as one historian has put it, ‘to gather from these random comings, goings and hibernations any coherent impression of what the occupation amounted to.’¹ The circumstances may have varied. The earlier camp might have been either within or without the walls of the city; either around the precincts of St Paul’s or thrown up west of the Fleet River amongst the derelict remains of Lundenwic. The camp at Fulham was perhaps more likely to have been newly built, a freshly laid out site with access to the Thames. Excavated Viking camps at Torksey (Lincolnshire), Repton (Derbyshire) and another site in North Yorkshire suggest that such camps covered extensive areas and hummed with activity. Trade, manufacture, engineering, gaming and family life – the site at Torksey has revealed all of this on a site of over sixty-five acres, more a small town than a temporary barracks.

Whatever conditions were like inside the perimeter of the camps at London and Fulham, relations with the locals were likely tense and probably violent. Raiders plundering the local countryside would have first secured the winter essentials – pigs, cattle, grain, ale – before coming for the horses, the silver, the women. It was a burden felt widely. The bishop of Worcester, Wærferth, was forced to sell off some of his land to cope with the ‘very pressing affliction and immense tribute of the barbarians, in that same year when the pagans stayed in London’.² Neither camp seems to have lasted more than a season, and the immediate threat of Viking occupation was in both cases transient. But in the fields and farms beyond the city, the world was changing fast, old certainties falling away sharply. In a little over a decade from the advent of the great horde in 865, two of the kingdoms that had traditionally exerted influence over London had been conquered (East Anglia) or dismantled (Mercia) by Viking armies. And although Alfred’s Wessex had endured, the resulting peace had left London on the front line of a volatile border. The story of how Alfred defeated an army led by the Viking leader Guthrum at Edington (Wiltshire) in 878, of how he had dwelt in the fen-fastness of Athelney (Somerset) before returning to smite his enemies like the avenging sword of the Almighty, has been told many times. Like all of the literary products of its time and place, it is replete with Alfredian myth-making.

In the peace that followed Edington (and the so-called Treaty of Wedmore), Alfred extracted from his erstwhile foe a number of key concessions, including his baptism and an agreement to change his name from Guthrum to Æthelstan. The key part of the whole ritualized encounter seems to have been – from Alfred’s perspective at least – the acceptance by Guthrum-Æthelstan of a symbolic filial subordination: he became, in the process of baptism, Alfred’s godson. It was a tacit acceptance of Alfred’s overlordship – an agreement to be his man. And though it might seem from a West Saxon perspective like total victory – a heathen warrior humbled, forced to his knees to kiss the cross and the ring of his conqueror – in reality it is hard to believe that Guthrum received nothing in return, that his defeat had been so total that it warranted nothing but humiliation.

Instead it seems likely that the negotiations included the recognition of Guthrum-Æthelstan as king of East Anglia – albeit a king who owed notional fealty to Alfred as his ‘father’ and overlord. Certainly, when the two men next met, it was perceived as a royal summit: the so-called Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum styles both men as ‘rex’. Amongst other provisions, that treaty – which is broadly datable to somewhere between 878 and Guthrum’s death in 890 – defined the respective spheres of influence of both kings. The dividing line was to be a boundary that ran ‘up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to Watling Street’. It was a treaty which conspicuously, and with obvious deliberation, scored a boundary around London, keeping it tucked just within the limits of Alfred’s authority.

Today the River Lea empties out into the Thames in Poplar, just east of the Isle of Dogs. To walk its course upriver is to pass through Stratford and past Hackney Marshes to Tottenham, Edmonton, Walthamstow, the river filling the Lea Valley reservoir chain, Epping Forest stretching away to the east. Its path carves through the Olympic Park, the ‘Olympicopolis’ so despised by Iain Sinclair: a ‘city of pop-ups, naming rights, committee-bodged artworks, cash-cow academies, post-truth blogs and charity runs’, an ‘emerging digital conceit on the Viking bank of the River Lea’.³ Sinclair seems at times unmoored by despair, enraged by the changes wrought by corporate money and empty technocracy on the cherished, untidy banks of the river. During construction of the Olympic Park he beat like an angry wasp against the notorious blue fence that enclosed the development, body and rhetoric levelled against the barrier. After Olympicopolis inevitably shimmered into three dimensions, he railed at this ‘theme park still to identify its theme’, still ‘waiting on input from a content provider’.⁴

Alfred, I am sure, would have approved of the Olympic Park; he emerges from the sources as a lover of order, a man didactic in his inclinations, managerial in style. He admired the Romans, planned grand building projects, enjoyed a good right-angle. I imagine he would have agreed that cleanliness is next to godliness. The world he and his scribes envisaged was a place of order and easy management, of binary choices and simple ethnicities: English, Danish; Christian, Heathen; Good, Bad. There were no shades of grey in Alfred’s little England, no room for conflicted loyalties, identities or beliefs: those things were chaos, and chaos lived beyond the pale in fifelcynnes eard – in ‘monster world’.⁵ In the ninth century, it was the slow drift of the Lea that became the limes, the tear in the fabric that separated Alfred’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ realm from another place – a world of confused allegiances and sundered bonds, where the alien Guthrum reigned as king of East Anglia and a host of unnamed Viking warlords and embattled Anglo-Saxon thegns struggled to make sense of a disordered world.

In truth, it is hard to imagine how this boundary was ever inscribed in reality – there were no ramparts, no watchtowers. No wall. Even within the city, the lines of authority were blurred, a messy West Saxon/Mercian compromise involving Kentish and Mercian bishops and the shadow of the new Scandinavian regime in East Anglia.fn1 As a notional approximation of the length of Alfred’s reach, the treaty placed London at the very tips of his outstretched fingers, barely within his grasp.

Perhaps it was this sense of insecurity that informed the tenor of what is perhaps the most famous of all mentions of London to emerge from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the record of a moment that has taken on an almost mythic status in the history of the city and of the nation, the moment in 886 when ‘King Alfred restored [gesette] fortress London [Lundenburh], and all the English [Angelcyn] turned to him, except for those in bondage [hæftniede] to Danish men [Deniscra manna], and he then bestowed [befæste] the stronghold on Ealdorman Æthelred to hold’.⁷ This, the Chronicle wishes us to know, is a moment for the ages, the apotheosis of English kingship, the reclaiming of London’s imperial destiny, the moment when Alfred transcended West Saxon parochialism to lay claim to a greater inheritance: a new realm, a realm of all the English, united against the common foe. Alfred had come to London as defender and liberator, to restore and to build, to fortify the mighty stronghold-city on the borders of his kingdom, to renew the legacy of Rome.

And yet, to turn a critical eye to the words and phrases the scribe employs in this one sentence is to find the half-truths, omissions and over-simplifications falling over themselves.

According to the mighty dictionary of Old English originally compiled by John Bosworth in 1838 and added to in 1898 and 1921 by Thomas Northcote Toller, the verb gesettan has numerous meanings – sixteen, in fact: ‘to set, put, fix, confirm, restore, appoint, decree, settle, possess, occupy, place together, compose, make, compare, expose, allay’.fn2

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