Roman London

232 Pages·1969·22.95 MB·English

by  Ralph Merrifield

ROMAN LONDON
Ralph Merrifield
Ralph Merrifield’s Roman Londomsthe
first, chronologically, in a series of
books that will give a portrait of the
city of London at significant periods
in its history. We sometimes think
that bygone London must be dead
and past, buried for ever beneath
towering office blocks and sprawling
suburban housing — but we are
wrong. These books describe a liv­
ing city, where each succeeding age
has left its indelible and identifiable
mark upon the London of today.
Londinium was a busy trading
and political center and an early
military base, built on the north
bank of a wider, shallow Thames,
where first it could be bridged, with
a ribbon-developed settlement on the
south bank. It bustled with famil­
iar, recognizable people: a careless
housewife who dropped her ladle
down a well, into which a girl’s
leather bikini trunks also, mysteri­
ously, found their way; a barge-
master whose boat sank at Black-
friars; an absentee workman whose
wanderings were immortalized in
six words scratched upon a tile;
and open-air tradesmen who held a
thriving market on the banks of the
Walbrook. In fact, we should prob­
ably feel curiously at home in the
London Mr. Merrifield so vividly
describes, with its mixture of gravity
and frivolity, taste and tawdriness,
public works and private enterprise,
sophistication and barbarism, crafts­
manship and gimcrackery.
(continued on back flap.)

ROMAN LONDON
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Roman City ojLondon
ROMAN
LONDON
R a lp h M c rrijie ld
I'RKDI.RICk A. I’RAI'Ail'.R, Publishers
New York • Wasliins^ion
BOOKS THAT MATTER
Published in the United States of America in 1969
by Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., Publishers
hi Fourth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003
© 1969, by Ralph Merrifield
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-751
Printed in Great Britain
TO MY MOTHER
Contents
page
Acknowledgments x
Introduction: Buried London i
The Origin of London io
Roman London as a Centre of Communications 28
Roman Roads North of the River 41
Roman Roads South of the River 57
The Status and Functions of Roman London 68
The Roman City 89
The Fortifications of Roman London 110
Beyond the City Limits 133
Life in Roman London 147
Religion in Roman London 168
Index 205