by CHRISTOPHER KELLY
London in the Roman World by Dominic Perring. Oxford, 573 pp., £40.
Once upon a time – and certainly before the Roman conquest – Britain was ruled by good King Lud. According to the utterly unreliable History of the Kings of Britain by the 12th-century Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lud rebuilt the walls of London, ‘encircling it with countless towers. He also commanded the citizens to construct houses … so that no city in all the surrounding kingdoms (some far distant) could boast finer residences.’ London was Lud’s favourite place. Indeed, it was named for him. In Geoffrey’s risible philology, ‘the city was called Kaer-lud, and then by corruption of the name, Kaer-london; and again by a shift of languages over the course of time, London.’
For all its flaws, Geoffrey’s history is a clever counter to the Roman imperial master narrative, which reworked conquest as the legitimate pacification of savage natives and the imposition of a foreign culture as the advance of civilisation and the rule of law. In the Aeneid, Virgil – the Rudyard Kipling of the Roman world – aimed to encapsulate an imperial mission statement for the Roman Empire. In the Underworld, the poem’s hero, Aeneas, receives a prophecy of Rome’s greatness from his father’s ghost: ‘Roman … your arts are to be these: to pacify and impose the rule of law; to spare the conquered and battle down the proud.’ Aeneas, fleeing the sack of Troy by the Greeks, and delayed by a dalliance with Dido in Carthage, finally made it to Italy. Here he backed the winning side in a local conflict, successfully settled the Trojan refugees, and established a royal line that would in time include Romulus and Remus.
Meanwhile – to continue with Geoffrey of Monmouth – long before Romulus murdered his twin and founded Rome, Aeneas’ great-grandson Brutus took possession of an island kingdom known as Albion, at that time inhabited by giants. There he settled a band of soldiers descended from Trojans who didn’t make it to Italy. Albion was renamed Britain (after Brutus, obviously), and its capital established at Troia Nova (New Troy). Geoffrey pushes ‘Troia Nova’ into ‘Trinovantes’, the British Celtic people who had opposed Julius Caesar’s brief and inconclusive campaigns in southern Britain in 55 and 54 BC. It is Brutus’s city of Troia Nova, then Trinovantum, which after Lud was known as Kaer-lud and then London.
These stories of Brutus and Lud are charming fictions, as unconvincing as Geoffrey’s etymologies. But they do make the case that Britain was civilised long before the Romans arrived. The claim of a thriving kingdom with an impressive walled capital was also attractive to Protestant reformers in the 16th century eager to emphasise their own independence from a now papal Rome. In 1586, the Ludgate (on Ludgate Hill, today the site of St Paul’s Cathedral) was rebuilt, and decorated with life-size statues of Elizabeth I and Lud. Here was a London anchored to a past that was demonstrably not Roman. (At the risk of causing disappointment, it ought to be added that the most likely origin of ‘Ludgate’ is the Old English hlid-geat: ‘postern’ or ‘swing-gate’. King Lud fades as a philological fabrication. The tattered statues of Lud and his sons, most likely those from the Ludgate, may be seen today in the porch of St Dunstan-in-the-West, just off Fleet Street.)
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