Johnson's Life of London Read online

  In 886 he “gesette” London, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He besieged it, or he occupied it, and at any rate there was another conflagration (of whatever dwellings the Vikings had constructed) and a considerable loss of Danish life. A famous hoard of coins, found at Croydon, indicates that now it was the turn of the Vikings to bury their goods and scram. Once he was in possession of the ancient Roman capital, Alfred was able to do as his godfather Leo had done in Rome. All those ideas he had absorbed, as a child-pilgrim, came pouring forth, and in the words of Asser, “he restored the city splendidly and made it habitable again.”

  Alfred wanted a city with history, and like so many rulers before and since he was filled with the “Dream of Rome,” the Charlemagne-style desire to assert his own credentials as the heir to the great Roman Christian culture that had once ruled Europe; and so he decreed that the Saxons would overcome their Romano-phobia and move back inside the vast, mouldering pink and white walls.

  From Cheapside down to the river he took a chunk of the old city, about 300 metres wide and 1,000 metres long. He created a grid pattern of streets, still visible at Garlick Hill, Bread Street, Bow Lane and other places. Lundenwic was over, and Lundenburg was born. The old city became the new city, and the new city became the old city—as the name Aldwych (old market) reminds us.

  New old London had two ports, at Billingsgate and Queenhithe, and trade began to flourish in the reconstructed wharves. We have turned up Norwegian ragstone hones and querns from Niedermendig in Germany. We have coins from Belgium, Normandy and Scotland, showing that London was recovering its identity as a multinational, multilingual kind of place.

  Alfred created the framework for 150 years of stability and growth. Even more important than the physical reconstruction, Alfred’s London embodied a huge new political fact. He put the city in the charge of a Mercian, Ealdorman Aethelred (whose name is supposed to survive in Aldermanbury), and London became the fulcrum and symbol of a new unity between Wessex and Mercia; and Alfred, himself married to a Mercian princess, Eahlswith, was no longer just king of Wessex.

  He came up with a new title. He was rex Anglosaxonum—king of the Anglo-Saxons, and he referred to his language as Englisc. When he died in 899, full of wealth and honour, he was described as “cyng ofer eall Ongelcynn”—King over all the English—and you can see the modern world’s master language struggling to emerge from that phrase, like the semi-human features of an Australopithecus.

  Alfred left 2,000 pounds of silver in his will, an astonishing sum for the age, and perhaps a sign that the Anglo-Saxons had learned to profit from the defeat of the Vikings and the clearing of the seaways. He also goes down as one of the greatest educators this country has ever had, who used the spread of literacy and Christianity as a weapon against the illiterate Danes.

  Alfred was a scholar, who personally translated Augustine, Boethius and the psalms into his own language. He was a lawgiver and theorist of government, with his own Domboc of dooms. His Churchillian energy and self-confidence inspired him to redesign the very boats his sailors were using.

  There may be some cynical modern historians who will tell you that Alfred’s boats were not much cop, turning out to be rather heavy and sluggish. But he can claim to be the direct creator of an Anglo-Saxon naval supremacy that still exists, somewhat to the irritation of Beijing, in the farthest reaches of the Pacific Ocean.

  He invented his own special Alfred clock—so that he could give up precisely half his hours to worshipping the Lord and half to earthly matters. After a great deal of experiment, he ordered his chaplains to gather together blobs of wax equivalent to the weight of seventy-two pennies. This block of wax was then to be divided into six very thin candles, each of them twelve inches long. Alfred had somehow worked out that each candle would burn for exactly four hours, and his plan was to have a permanent supply and burn them continuously, day and night, so that he could mark the exact passage of time.

  Alas, the various tents and churches he occupied were so breezy that he found it very hard to keep his Alfred-o-meter going. Hmm, said Alfred, stroking his beard. We need something that lets the light through and keeps the wind off. . . .

  So he ordered his carpenters to make a wood-framed box, with side panels of horn so thin as to be translucent—and lo! the King had invented the lantern!

  As it happens, modern scholars have struggled to replicate his candle-powered clock. They claim a thin twelve-inch candle burns out much sooner than four hours. That feels like pedantry. This was a man who not only beat back the Vikings and united his country; ships, clocks, lanterns—he had a string of major patents to his name.

  So what has happened to us all, that we have forgotten this soldier-scholar-polymath and saviour of his country? There is one statue in the Strand, near the Law Courts, which rightly commemorates his legal contributions—but absolutely nothing to remind Londoners of what he did for the city.

  There used to be a plaque at his port of Queenhithe, until it got “lost” by developers, and was restored only at the insistence of the excellent John Clark, lately of the Museum of London. “One almost suspects damnatio memoriae,” says Mr. Clark, “or collective amnesia.”

  Part of the answer may be that Alfred left no obvious physical legacy, no London touchstone. Those Saxon palaces, those churches—not a brick or post of them survives. But we must also face the sad fact that he is in many ways so deeply uncool. There is something about his exhausting Christian virtue, his colossal energy and self-denial, that was probably more appealing to the Victorians than it is to us.

  We modern sensualists are puzzled that a man should pray for piles to cure his sexual feelings. “Even as the bee must die when she stings in her anger, so must every soul perish after unlawful lust,” wrote Alfred lugubriously, in an embellishment of his Boethius translation.

  Novelists and Hollywood have struggled in vain to inject some sexual zing into his character. We must also accept that for much of the past century he was slightly too Teutonic to be a completely successful national hero. It was perfectly fine, in Queen Victoria’s time, to note the strong connexions between the early English and the Germans. She was married to a German herself. But after two world wars, the association has become less popular.

  These days, I am afraid, Alfred suffers not so much from being Germanic but from being history’s ultimate Anglo-Saxon. At the Alfred University in Alfred, New York, the faculty decided in the 1990s that they would commission a statue of their eponymous figurehead. Alas, the move was instantly controversial, with Dr. Linda Mitchell protesting that “if the university is claiming a dedication to diversity, it would be foolish to choose a symbol so exclusive and effective in emphasising the dead white male power structure in history.”

  Even in Winchester, the capital of Wessex, they have betrayed the memory of the old boy. Between 1928 and 2004 there was a seat of learning called King Alfred’s College. It is now the University of Winchester.

  One Saturday morning in December, I decided to go in search of Queenhithe, the port Alfred commissioned in what had been the old Roman city. Surely, I said to myself, you can’t get rid of a whole port. There must be something to see. I had just reached Upper Thames Street when the Almighty unleashed the biggest snowstorm the capital had seen for a hundred years, and I am afraid Queenhithe and all traces of Alfredian infrastructure were lost, along with everything else, in a white hell.

  It was only a couple of weeks later, when the snow had cleared, that I finally found it. I was very pleased to have made the effort. There it is—an amazing square inlet in the shoreline of the Thames, surrounded now by red-brick modern flats and office blocks. Nobody was watching me, and in an instant I had hopped over the wall and was standing on Alfred’s very shore. I looked beneath my feet, and my jaw dropped.

  Queenhithe is where things wash up, and beneath my feet were thousands—hundreds of thousands—of bones: white b
ones, brown bones, the jaws of sheep, the ribs of pigs, the femurs of cows; and jumbled among them were innumerable broken stems of white clay pipes and bits of coal and tile and pot. As I looked across I could see the snazzy restaurants on the South Bank, the Globe theatre complex. But I was standing on a midden of London history, stretching back to heaven knows when.

  I understood how perfectly Queenhithe is protected from the current of the river, how ideal it must have been for loading and unloading, and I could see how Alfred’s port had played its part in the recovery of medieval London; and I thought indignantly of those who have allowed the memory of Alfred to die, and the apathy of our age.

  If it hadn’t been for Alfred, London might have gone the way of Silchester and other abandoned Roman towns.

  If it hadn’t been for Alfred, there wouldn’t have been an English nation, and this book would probably be written in Danish.

  * * *

  After a century of peace, the Danes were back, and it is a tribute to Alfred’s legacy that London was the prize. The port was open, and trade with the continent had resumed, in bacon or wool (depending on whether a crucial manuscript refers to “lardam” or “lanam”).

  Alfred had put back the bridge, and though the Londoners who trudged across it were generally runtier and fewer than in Roman times, they had a healthy rustic menu: peas and roots for broth, eggs for scrambling, the odd blubberfish for blubberfish stew.

  They had lost the luxurious wines and spices of the Roman Empire; they had lost the fine Syrian tableware. But London was the seat of the first democratic institution—the Saxon folkmoot that met by St. Paul’s—and Londoners were making enough money to be well worth attacking.

  In 994 the Danes arrived and met stout resistance. For the next fifty years mastery of the city went one way and then the other. In 1014 the Saxons lost to Danish Sweyn Forkbeard; but later that year they came back and actually attacked their own bridge so that their ships could get at the Danish-held town.

  With the help of some Norwegian allies led by King Olaf, they tied ropes to the wooden posts and pulled it down—which is why a billion children have sung a rhyme to the effect that London Bridge is falling down. The following year Sweyn’s son Cnut was on the scene, and by 1016 he had taken control.

  In addition to being history’s most evocative misprint, the half-Danish, half-Polish Cnut has a fine regal record. The Danes no longer burned churches. They were Christians, so they built them. They didn’t abolish the folkmoot. They had a Danish version called the “hustings” (house things).

  In the most farsighted of all his deeds, Cnut took his officials to a marshy place to the west of the Roman city, where the river bends and runs north-south. On a flat called Thorney Island, he found a place to build a residence, and it was here—at least according to the guides of the House of Commons—that he put his chair on the shore and used the incoming tide to show his courtiers the limits of governmental power.

  The spot is now occupied by the Palace of Westminster, where the point of his parable is so often forgotten.

  Cnut was followed by Edward the Confessor in using Thorney/Westminster as the centre of royal and political authority, and the Normans were to go further still in the development of the rival site. Ever since, the story of London has involved that basic tension, between the politicians and the moneymen, between the cities of London and of Westminster.

  It was during this seesaw period that Londoners got the idea that they had the right to “elect” the King of England. They liked to think they had chosen Edward the Confessor, in 1042, by popular acclaim.

  They even liked to think they had “offered” the crown to William the Conqueror—a touching belief, under the circumstances, in their own democratic prerogatives.

  William the Conqueror

  The tower builder

  It was a cold and clammy morning. A biting wind was coming up off the Thames. A huge glossy raven gave a metallic caw, and the white tower seemed to get bigger and more sinister as we came in under its eaves.

  As we approached the monument of William the Conqueror, I gazed up through the thin mist at its chalky stones and felt the savagery of the place. It wasn’t so much the thought of the ghosts of Anne Boleyn and the other men and women slaughtered on the grounds—just over there, in fact, where a yellow-jacketed janitor was sweeping something up. Nor was I thinking of the corpses of children they found in the walls, or the thousands of headless bodies they discovered under the church.

  Ever since it was made—at the behest of the Conqueror—the Tower of London has been a Lubyanka, an expression of power, a horrible bully of a building.

  “It was a skyscraper for the times,” said the Yeoman Jailer, RSM Victor Lucas, as we cricked our necks to inspect its beautiful lines. “Anglo-Saxon London had nothing on this scale.” Of course it was handy for controlling the Thames, and it put an end to the relentless aquatic invasions that had destabilised London over the centuries. But its main purpose was surely symbolic.

  It told the English that they had been beaten. They had been thrashed, licked, stuffed, conquered by a race of people who built great dungeons and keeps on a scale that had never been attempted on the island.

  The Normans didn’t even build the tower with indigenous stone. They disdained the Kentish ragstone and shipped in limestone from Caen. Not only the design but the very substance of the building is an import, a colossal alien cuboid that crash-landed amid the Roman ruins and the huddled Anglo-Saxon huts.

  The whole thing was an insult, and it was also the most audacious fraud. This William—from whom today’s aristocrats like to trace their descent—he wasn’t even English. It was an act of usurpation.

  He was born in Falaise, the son of Robert I of Normandy, in about 1028, and he was a bastard. That is, he was the illegitimate product of Robert’s union with a tanner’s daughter, and he had some difficulty asserting his claim to Normandy, never mind to the English throne.

  Remember that in 1066 Harold Godwinson had been properly acclaimed as king; he had been named as the heir of Edward the Confessor. What was William to do with England?

  He was a Norman, the descendant of Frenchified Vikings who had been settled in that part of France since Rollo arrived there in 911. He didn’t speak Anglo-Saxon. His only link with London was that he was the great-nephew of Emma, the wife of Ethelred the Unready, one of the most famously useless kings in English history. It is a tenuous connexion, and yet William was convinced that he was born to rule England. He set about doing so with frightening efficiency.

  Having cheated a childhood assassination attempt (they stabbed the baby in the next-door crib), William grew up tall—well, about five foot ten, which was tallish for a Norman—with gingery hair and powerful arms that enabled him to shoot arrows from a horse at full gallop. He was a hearty eater, and in middle age he had acquired such a belly that his enemies said he was pregnant. He was a voracious student of the arts of hunting and war, so that by the death of Edward the Confessor he was psychologically ready for an expedition of Caesar-like audacity, a seaborne invasion that would change England and the world forever.

  King Harold’s problem was that he had to fight on two fronts. He had just beaten off a fearsome challenge from the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, when he heard the news of Duke William’s preparation. He hurried his weakened and depleted forces south, and drew them up at Senlac hill in Sussex, not far from where the Normans had come ashore. By the end of the day—October 14, 1066—he was dead, shot in the eye, and his housecarls were cut down around him. William was on the verge of completing the last successful invasion of England by a foreign power.

  It was one thing to proclaim yourself the conqueror of a small hill on the Sussex coast, but ever since Alfred had restored the city and its fortifications, London held the key to the kingdom. London was the fat spider at the centre of the web of R
oman roads, and it took William a surprisingly long time to make himself master of the city. Indeed, the more closely you study the story, the more you wonder whether Hastings was as decisive as all that.

  Perhaps Londoners could have held out. Perhaps they could have changed the course of history—had they not behaved so badly, or been so badly led.

  “London is a great city,” says the twelfth-century “Song of the Battle of Hastings,” “overflowing with froward inhabitants and richer than the rest of the country. Protected on the left side by its walls and on the right side by the river, it neither fears enemies nor dreads being taken by storm.” In the end, it was the cynicism and divisions among Londoners that handed the city—and the country—to William.

  For about a month after Hastings, William hung around, hoping that London would just drop into his lap. There was a pro-Norman faction behind the walls, and indeed the court of Edward the Confessor had shown Normanising tendencies. But for the time being, these pro-Normans were outnumbered by the pro-Saxons, who favoured the claims of one Edgar the Atheling.

  You have to understand that London was at this stage a bit of a multi-culti maelstrom. In the previous seventy years it had chopped and changed so often between English and Scandinavian rulers that by the time William arrived at Hastings, London was milling with Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Danes and Anglo-Celts and Anglo-Normans, to say nothing of the other international merchants in the city. If you went into a shop and ordered a pound of offal, it is not at all clear what language you would be expected to speak. While Londoners bickered in their various tongues, William’s troops got dysentery. He tried to bring matters to a head by attacking the south of the city, burning much of Southwark to the ground; and yet somehow the victor of Hastings was repulsed—which shows, perhaps, what the Londoners might have achieved had they possessed more discipline.