Johnson's Life of London Read online

  Somewhere on the site of what is now our cathedral, the Roman Mellitus persuaded Saeberht, the nephew of Aethelberht, to let him construct a church. In the ruins of what had been a temple of Diana, he built a simple wooden nave and dedicated it to St. Paul.

  Christianity was back in the soil of London—but only precariously.

  Sometime around 616 or 618 both Aethelberht and Saeberht died, and Christianity lost its two most important Saxon patrons. According to the Venerable Bede, the son of Aethelberht, Eadwald, behaved particularly badly. He immediately reverted to paganism and announced that he was shacking up with his father’s wife—not the sort of thing to tell Pope Gregory.

  As for the sons of Saeberht, they mocked the good Mellitus. They spotted the new bishop of London giving the host—the body of Christ—to communicants in his little wooden church.

  “Give us some of that bread, O Mellitus,” said the pagan Saeberht boys.

  “Well,” said Mellitus, “you can have some bread, but only if you believe in Christ and let me lave you with holy water.”

  “Lave us?” said the Saeberht boys. “We don’t want to be laved. Just give us some of that bread.”

  “Sorry,” said Mellitus. “You can’t have one without the other. If you want the bread, you have to believe.”

  At that point, alas, the uncouth youths abused the bishop roundly and he was driven out of London, never to return.

  In the end Mellitus’s legacy was to prove astonishing. The building originally founded by Mellitus was to become the symbol of national defiance during the Blitz, and to this day the glimpses of St. Paul’s are so sacred to Londoners that they are protected by elaborate viewing corridors. No building may impede the sight of the dome from Richmond Hill, Primrose Hill and other high spots around the city.

  Yet when Mellitus was kicked out, paganism remained so strong in London that it was not until 654 that Cedd succeeded as second bishop and resumed the see of London. “Long time no see!” as he doubtless put it in his first sermon.

  I thought of Mellitus one evening in 2010 when I had the honour of meeting the Pope. I stood on the tarmac at Heathrow, a representative of this modern metropolis with its myriad races and beliefs; and I felt vaguely that I should offer some apology or explanation for the irreligiousness and hedonism of my fellow Londoners.

  I felt like some woad-painted, butter-haired, betrousered Saxon savage, forced to explain himself and his city to this effulgent vision from Rome. At last the Pope appeared from his Alitalia jet, evidently exhausted but still somehow glowing—like a sugared almond—in his white vestments and scarlet slippers.

  “It all goes back to 410,” I said, when we were on a sofa together in the Royal Lounge.

  He looked at me keenly, as though trying to remember what had happened at teatime.

  What I meant, I babbled, was that the decision of Honorius was of huge psychohistorical importance for this country. Britain was unlike so many other parts of the Roman Empire in that we underwent a complete reversion.

  A city that had once been entirely Roman and entirely Christian had lapsed, had lurched back into the arms of paganism and sin.

  And if time had allowed, I would have gone on to blurt my feeling that there would always be a sub-tectonic paganism and wildness about London; and that our fifth-century experience of a sundering from Rome—and a betrayal by Rome—would always leave us with a subconscious mistrust of any great continental scheme for a religious or a political union.

  I was about to tell him of my theory that the umbilical severing by Honorius was a partial explanation for everything from Henry VIII to the British refusal to join the Euro.

  Luckily for the Holy Father, I had only embarked on a couple of sentences when a cavalcade of cardinals came to take him to his hotel.

  “Very interesting!” he said.

  * * *

  It is easy to laugh at poor Bishop Mellitus, hounded out of London by the ungrateful pagans, but in recapturing the city—and the country—for Christianity, we could surely argue that he was a figure of decisive historical importance.

  Imagine if he had never been able to found that frail wooden Church of St. Paul’s, or to replant the tender bloom of faith in the blackened soil of post-Roman London. Imagine if the British elite had continued—to this day—to swear by brooks and glades and rocks and not by Jesus Christ. The British Empire would frankly have had a very different flavour. So would the story of the United States of America. We would be talking about “one nation, indivisible under Woden,” and instead of Christmas or Thanksgiving, I expect we would all be complaining about the excessive commercialisation of Bloodmonath.

  This fantasy will of course be dismissed by believers in a divine Christian plan, but for the next three hundred years after Mellitus the pagans were never far away, and their methods were vicious.

  Of Mellitus’s church there is no sign today, and indeed there is no trace of early Saxon habitation in the old Roman London. The Saxons moved out west to huddled settlements at Aldwych and Covent Garden, and up the Thames came the enemy.

  One man can take much of the credit for beating them off, and for reoccupying and rebuilding the ancient city. After London’s centuries of decay, he was sufficiently literate to revive the memory of Rome.

  Alfred the Great

  He restored London and suffers from being a dead white male

  It was only a hundred years ago that Britain could claim to be the greatest power on Earth. Royal Navy Dreadnoughts roamed the seas. Statues were raised in honour of the founder of the navy, an axe-wielding, cross-gartered fellow with a flowing beard and deep-set eyes beneath a kind of Santa Claus hat.

  Every child in England knew his name, and at one festival in his honour Lord Rosebery made a speech in which, among other superlative compliments, he hailed Alfred as “the ideal Englishman, the perfect sovereign, the pioneer of England’s greatness.” E. A. Freeman, the Whig historian, later called him “the most perfect character in history.”

  Alfred not only has a claim to be the father of the navy, and therefore of the empire and the entire supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon world—still just about alive at the beginning of the twenty-first century—but he also revived learning in a benighted land, beat off a sadistic pagan enemy and united his country, and will go down as a man who saved London from oblivion.

  Yet today Alfred is almost ludicrously unfashionable. His images are being lost or covered up; his statue in Wantage is regularly vandalised. Children are taught nothing about him: it is as if we are determined to send him back to the Dark Ages from which he rescued us.

  Insofar as we have relics of Saxon London before Alfred, they are dispiriting stuff. There are broken-toothed combs carved from the shoulder bones of sheep. There are pewter baubles you might expect to find at Camden Lock Market, except not so good.

  There is the splotchy-glazed primary school pottery, and when you sit in one of the conjectural wooden dwellings in the Museum of London you have the impression of hippie squalor. There is no brick, no stone, no frescoes, no mosaic and certainly no public sanitation of a kind the Romans had used.

  Perhaps some Anglo-Saxon historians will insist that we are talking of a golden age—but you have only to squat in that reconstructed hut to smell the smoke in your matted hair and the aromas of the pigs, and soon you feel a Dark Age dankness seeping up your ankles, to be followed by the chilblains and the pustules and an overall life expectancy of thirty-two.

  The population had fallen cataclysmically since the days of Hadrian—to perhaps a few thousand. Londoners owed a distant allegiance to Essex or to Offa, the brutish and illiterate king of Mercia. They had moved out of the old Roman city, apparently because of some superstitious dread of the ruins.

  Still, it seems there was something to be said for Lundenwic, the area they settled around the Strand and Aldwych.
We have found pots that show there was busy trade with Merovingian Europe. In the 1980s, excavations around Covent Garden found a street with about sixty houses in it.

  In the words of the Venerable Bede, London was still “a mart of many nations resorting to it by land and sea.” In spite of its decline, London at the beginning of the ninth century was probably the richest and most important place in the country—in a not very hotly contested field. Things were about to get a good deal worse.

  There is a sense in which you could say that the Anglo-Saxons had it coming. They were, after all, predators themselves. They were Germans, blond-haired toughs from the plain between the Elbe and the Weser, and they had behaved so aggressively towards the existing population—killing them and kicking them out wherever they could—that the Byzantine historian Procopius got the impression that Britain was actually two countries: a place called Brettania, opposite Spain, and Brettia, a more Germanic place opposite the mouth of the Rhine.

  Even during the reign of Alfred the Saxons continued to persecute the Romano-Celtic Britons, driving them west to Wales and Cornwall. Alfred’s maternal grandfather was a royal butler named Oslac, and it was one of Oslac’s boasts that his family had killed all the British they could find in the Isle of Wight.

  The Saxons had been merchants of genocide, and in the years before Alfred was born they got their comeuppance. Some say the raiders were driven by a population boom in Denmark, where the habit of polygamy had produced many younger sons of second wives, all casting envious eyes on the sheepfolds of England. Whatever the reasons, the Vikings came to Britain, sailing up the rivers in their sneaky, flat-bottomed craft and disembarking with hideous ululations.

  Captured Saxon kings suffered the rite of the “blood eagle,” which in its milder version meant carving an eagle on the person’s back; but which properly involved hacking the back ribs from the vertebrae of the still living victim, reaching into the thorax and pulling out the lungs, draping them artistically over the spread ribs so as to form “the wings of an eagle.”

  They conducted other forms of human sacrifice. They sacked churches, because a church, to them, was just another building, if one more likely to contain gold. The desperate kings of Wessex and Mercia tried to bribe them to go away. The Vikings took the gold and swore dreadful oaths that they would go—and ratted on the deal. In 842, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, there was a raid on London, “with a great slaughter”; but the real disaster took place in 851.

  A fleet of 350 ships under Rorik sailed up the mouth of the Thames. First they stormed Canterbury. Then they sailed farther on, landed on the north bank of the Thames and sacked Lundenwic. The women were raped. The men were killed. The blood flowed in rivulets into the Thames.

  The man who would one day avenge this disaster was then only three or four. He was growing up in a huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ and prayin’ environment on the estates of royal Wessex. He was the son of Aethelwulf, the son of Egbert, the son of Ealhmund, the son of Eafa, the son of Eoppa, the son of Ingild—in other words, he was a proper Saxon toff.

  The only trouble was that his parents had already had four sons—Aethelstan, Aethelbald, Aethelberht, Aethelred—and a daughter, called, you guessed it, Aethelswith. Alfred began with the advantage of the snappier name (it seems to mean something like elf-wisdom).

  His biographer—a sycophantic monk named Asser—tells us that the young child beat his elder siblings in a poetry-memorising contest. One can imagine the disgust of all the older Aethelkiddies at the sight of this golden-haired Little Lord Fauntleroy, prattling away in front of his beaming mother.

  Even more important in his development, Alfred was singled out by father Aethelwulf for a treat. Aethelwulf was in theory a descendant of Woden, lord of the pagan gods, but he was a devout Christian, so God-fearing that shortly after the Battle of Ockley (or Aclea) in 852, he did a most peculiar thing. The Vikings were still circling England—the threat had not gone away—and yet he decided to take the five-year-old child across the sea and over the mountains on a pilgrimage to Rome.

  Pope Leo IV welcomed the bearded Saxon in St. Peter’s Basilica, and while flunkeys discreetly relieved the king of Wessex of his tribute—a 4-pound gold crown, an ornamental sword and a purple-dyed tunic embossed with golden keys—the Pope came up with a fitting compliment for his visitor. Aethelwulf was created a consul. The highest office of the Roman republic, which poor old Cicero had flogged his guts out to achieve, was handed out like buttons to this obscure Germanic chieftain; and little Alfred was made the Pope’s godson.

  With treatment like that, it is no surprise that the Rome experience seems slightly to have gone to Aethelwulf’s head. Father and son stayed for a whole year, living in the Schola Saxonum—a huddle of Saxon-style huts up against St. Peter’s, designed for the use of religious tourists from England—and spending yet more of his country’s cash on doing up Roman churches. Two years later, when Alfred was seven, they came again, on a second pilgrimage.

  Not so long ago I took my daughter to Rome, and we walked around the Colosseum, which now appears pretty much as it must have in Alfred’s time. I looked up at the rain coming down like silver darts past its sooty arches, and thought how much vaster and madder it is than it appears in the photos. Imagine the impact of those buildings on his young mind—the scale of the Roman architecture. The whole of Saxon Southampton—the biggest commercial centre outside London—could have fit comfortably into the baths of Caracalla.

  Of course, much of Rome was as ruined as Roman London. But the impressive thing about little Alfie’s godfather, Pope Leo, was that he was determined to erect Christian structures to rival the pagan relics. He built massive walls around the Vatican and what had once been the Mausoleum of Hadrian is now the Castel Sant’Angelo. At the age when a child is most impressionable, Alfred the Great saw the remaking of a city, and understood something that had been all but forgotten in England—the idea of the city itself.

  It was an idea the Vikings rejected with violence. They weren’t interested in building cities; they were interested in burning them.

  In 860 they sacked Winchester, the capital of Wessex, and Alfred came to manhood engaged in an almost continuous struggle with the heathen. His father had died in 858, and one by one his older brothers proceeded to die, none of them reaching the age of thirty. In 871 a twenty-three-year-old Alfred took the crown in wretched circumstances. The Vikings were out of control, and in 872 part of the Great Heathen Army decided to reoccupy the desolation of London, raping and pillaging anyone who happened still to be knocking around. It looks as if the Viking chief Halfdene even had a coin minted in London, just to show who was boss.

  Alfred was driven to paying the Danegeld, a tribute to try to keep the Viking raiders at bay (not in itself a disgraceful strategy; it is still used, with mixed results, against the Taliban), and found himself eventually harried into the wilds of the Somerset marshes, a fugitive in his own country. There he is said to have burned some cakes in a peasant woman’s hearth, and in the words of 1066 and All That, became Alfred the Grate. There, too, legend has it, he and a servant disguised themselves in order to spy on the Danish camp.

  To a degree that is almost embarrassing to modern taste, Alfred had a Victorian public school spirit, a muscular Christianity and a fervent belief not just in God but that the mind can be trained to overcome the infirmities of the body. As he came of age he was perturbed by his sexual urges, and actually prayed for a disease that would distract him. The Almighty rewarded him with piles so sizeable that after a particularly agonising hunting trip in Cornwall he stopped at a monastery and prayed for another disease.

  He then fell victim to a mysterious abdominal pain that afflicted him for the rest of his life, and which has been identified as Crohn’s disease. Later on, when Alfred thought of himself as a G20-style world leader, he wrote to Patriarch Elias of Jerusalem, inviting that learned authori
ty to advise him on his intestinal grief. Elias sent back a disgusting series of remedies, including scammony for constipation, “gutamon” for stitch, spikenard for diarrhea, tragacanth for corrupt phlegms, petroleum to drink by itself for “inward tenderness” and the “white stone” for all unknown afflictions.

  It is not clear if or when Alfred really started to drink petroleum to cure his aching stomach, but most modern doctors agree that if he could survive the Patriarch’s medicine, he could probably survive anything. Overmastering his innards, and perhaps with high-octane fumes already shooting from his rear end, Alfred came roaring out of those marshes. He forged the Saxons into a “fyrd,” or standing army, organising a rota system so that each man would have time to go back to his fields. He changed the whole defensive approach, converting about thirty towns into fortified double-ringed “burhs.” In 878 the Saxons clashed decisively with the Danes at Edington.

  The armies closed like hoplites, first throwing their spears—between 1.8 and 2.4 metres long. Then it was a grunting, heaving affair of shield-boss against shield-boss; and if you look at the surviving Saxon stabbing swords—slender, evil-looking seaxes and scaramaxes—you can see why the Vikings did not like being at the sharp end. Gudrum the Viking was vanquished, and agreed, rather halfheartedly, to be baptised, with Alfred standing as his proud godfather.

  Edington was the turning point, the moment the Viking threat began to wane. But still the brutes would not entirely go away. In 882 it seems they raided London again, though who or what they were raiding is not clear. Perhaps the sad truth is that the settlement was so beaten up that there was no government to speak of—and yet London remained strategically crucial. It was still at the centre of the web of Roman roads, and if Alfred was to stop the Vikings moving around east and southeast England, the simplest thing was to gain control of the crossroads.