London Before Londinium: a Prehistory of the Thames

The foundation of Roman Londinium – thought to date to around 47 AD – is the starting point of the history of London as a city. That was when an urban centre with a recorded title and a functioning economy and government first emerged into view in Roman sources and archaeological discoveries.

But it would be wrong to say that that is exactly when the story of London – or, at least, the story of what would become London – begins. There’s lots and lots of fragmentary evidence to suggest that humans lived, farmed, fought, worshipped and died on the banks of the Thames for hundreds and even thousands of years prior to the arrival of the Romans.

It’s been suggested that the Romans may have decided to found a major settlement at the spot where the City of London exists today because a large town was already established there. No primary sources exist to tell us for sure since prehistoric Britons didn’t keep any records, and archaeological excavations within central London (rare because of the density of the modern city) are yet to dig up anything corroborating. But through educated guesswork we can make plenty of conclusions – and a few speculations – about London’s prehistoric past.

Myths and Legends

One early historian, writing around 1136 AD, laid out a very fanciful case for what he believed to be the prehistoric origins of London. It’s easily dismissed as gibberish, but is worth recounting as measure of some of the ingrained myths that have abounded throughout the ages about the earliest roots of this famous capital.

Geoffrey of Monmouth was a Welsh clergyman and scholar, most famously associated with propagating the legends of King Arthur. His best-known work was Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) – a pseudohistorical tome through which he attempted to tenuously connect Celtic royalty to the heroic world of the Greeks. Chronologically, the book tells the tales of all of the country’s monarchs over the course of 2,000 years, beginning with Brutus – an imaginary descendent of the Trojan hero Aeneas – who is attributed with founding Britain and naming it eponymously.

After Brutus’s warrior associate Corineus defeated in combat the supernatural giant Gogmagog – a kind of aggregate of two Biblical nasties, Gog and Magog – he was said to have founded London.

“Once he had divided up his kingdom,” wrote Monmouth, “Brutus decided to build a capital. In pursuit of this plan, he visited every part of the land in search of a suitable spot. He came at length to the River Thames, walked up and down its banks and so chose a site suited to his purpose. There then he built a city and called it Troia Nova.”

Troia Nova means “New Troy”. According to Monmouth, a number of British monarchs held court in the city, including King Lud, who renamed it CaerLudein after himself, from which the name London is said to derive.

Monmouth’s story is almost certainly a load of nonsense. But the extent to which his tale has become ingrained in London’s psyche are exemplified by the fact that Gog and Magog remain the traditional symbolic guardians of the City of London. Two wicker effigies of the pair can be seen carried at the head of the Lord Mayor’s Procession each November, as they have been every year since the reign of Henry V. The true tale of prehistoric London is unfortunately much less dramatic than Monmouth’s version.

The Earliest Londoners

By the mid-Neolithic period, around about 3500 BC – some 2,500 years after the final land bridge with continental Europe had been swallowed by the sea – the emerging people of Britain had started to get settled properly into their surroundings, building homes and monuments. Among them were spectacular structures such as Stonehenge – situated just 80 miles southwest of London. But actual settlements with numerous permanent buildings remained fairly rare – especially in England, where Neolithic people seemed to prefer to live a more mobile pattern of life than their counterparts in Ireland or Scotland.

That changes as we move into the Bronze Age (around 2200 to 750 BC) and the Iron Age (around 750 BC to 43 AD), when the Greater London area begins to show evidence of scattered settlements. For instance, one recent archaeological dig at the site of the London 2012 Olympic Park at Stratford uncovered the remains of a Bronze Age hut and a grave containing four Iron Age skeletons – enough to suggest that the area was “settled and utilised continuously from the prehistoric period onwards,” according to Museum of London Archaeology senior archaeologist Kieron Tyler (quoted in the Daily Mail). “These people lived and died [there],” he added.

Similar evidence of small-scale settlements have been found at other sites around Greater London. At Petter’s Field in Egham, southwest of central London, various Bronze and Iron Age remains have been detected, including multiple post-holes indicating that as many as six circular huts once stood there. Brentford – built around a historical fording-point at the confluence of the River Thames and the River Brent in West London – must have been an important meeting location for pre-Romanic tribes, because abundant prehistoric artefacts have been found scattered around the area, including Bronze Age pottery and flints, and weapons that may have been ritually cast into the river. One well-known Iron Age piece, dating from about 100 BC to 50 AD and currently on display in the Museum of London, is the Brentford horn-cap – a chariot fitting that features some beautiful examples of Celtic art still copied today by jewellery makers.

Julius Caesar and the South-Eastern Britonic Tribes

We get a valuable snapshot of prehistoric London from one of the Romans’ first incursions into Britain, under Julius Caesar in 54 BC. They found a number of warring tribes prominent in the region. The Trinovantes – who allied themselves with the invading Romans – controlled lands that overlap with modern north-eastern Greater London. They’re recorded by the Romans as “the strongest civitas in south-eastern Britain” – a remark that led Monmouth to conclude that Caesar’s troops had come across a city. Modern historians prefer to read the remark as meaning that the Romans had encountered a strong political unit – “civitas” can mean a tribe, chiefdom or civic administration.

Opposing the Roman invasion was the warlord Cassivellaunus – the first British person in history whose name is recorded. He was chief of the Catuvellauni tribe, who occupied territories bordering the Trinovantes (their enemies) north of the Thames. In one skirmish, reports Roman records, Catuvellauni forces defended a ford over the river – possibly near Westminster – by fortifying it with sharpened sticks dug into the banks and below the water. After the Romans entered his lands, Cassivellaunus was finally captured following a siege at a hillfort north of London – probably the one at Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire. By that point, various other tribes of the south-eastern England and the Thames Valley area – including the Cenimagni, the Segontiaci, the Ancalites, the Bibroci and the Cassi – had already surrendered to Caesar.

The London area was evidently buzzing with tribal activity in the 1st century BC, and disputed boundaries clearly existed between them there – with the Thames in particular representing a physical border. Various artefacts have been discovered which testify to battles having taken place on the banks of the Thames throughout the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. These include a bronze shield with a spear driven through it, and a Bronze Age spearhead stuck in a human pelvis-bone.

It’s archaeological finds like this that we can use as dots to be joined in building up a bigger picture of a prehistoric landscape that was alive with habitation, activity and conflict long before the Romans first invaded.

Some Archaeological Finds and What They Tell Us

All kinds of other prehistoric remains and artefacts of varying usage have been discovered scattered across the London area. One of the most recent finds was London’s oldest timber structure, dug up in 2009 at a site across from Belmarsh Prison in Greenwich. Buried 4.7 metres deep in a peat bog, the platform or trackway has been radiocarbon-dated at 6,000 years old – that’s 500 years older than Stonehenge. The wetlands of the Thames floodplain were a vital source of food for its prehistoric inhabitants – they would have used this item as a means of crossing particularly boggy patches.

Thousands of prehistoric bones have been fished from the Thames, among them a trepanned skull found at Chelsea dating back to 1750 BC. It proves that primitive forms of surgery were carried out as early as the Bronze Age. Indeed, Chelsea – particularly during the building of the old Chelsea Bridge in the 1850s – has proven a very rich source of archaeological finds, the most famous of them all being the Battersea Shield, a beautiful Celtic ritual item currently on display at the British Museum that’s been dated to as far back as 300 BC. So many Celtic and Roman skeletons and weapons has been found in the Thames at Chelsea that some historians believe it was there that Caesar’s army faced-off against Cassivellaunus’s forces in 54 BC, rather than at Westminster.

The Thames was an big force in the minds of prehistoric people who lived on its banks. Back then it was a huge, untamed tidal river, fed by numerous tributaries. Its scale and power meant that prehistoric people associated it with gods and spirits, to whom they would make ritual offerings and sacrifices by throwing objects into the water.

At Vauxhall, South London, where numerous tributaries join the Thames, the remains of a 3,000 year-old wooden jetty or bridge were investigated by Channel 4's Time Team in 2001. It appeared to have once led out to a small natural island in the river; combined with the discovery nearby of two bronze spearheads driven into the bank, archaeologists were able to speculate that this was one such point where Bronze Age people made votive offerings to the river deities.

The wild flow of the Thames in prehistoric times served to make the area of London a far different geological entity than it is today. Westminster Abbey, for instance, stands on what used to be Thorney Island, which once split the river Tyburn where it joined the Thames. It has yielded plenty of evidence of pre-Romanic habitation: at Westminster underground station, which was excavated during the extension of the Jubilee Line in the late 90s, some late Bronze Age pottery and even a few rare Neolithic flints and stone tools were found beneath Parliament Square. Prehistoric people clearly once lived right at the heart of what is today modern London.

A Pre-Roman London?

Is it possible that, by the time the Romans arrived, a single, substantial settlement might even have existed in the central London area, right where Londinium (roughly the centre of the modern City of London) would later be founded after Emperor Claudius’s conquering of Britain in 43 AD? Some people think so, based on evidence implicit in the sacking of the city during Boudica’s revolt in 61 AD.

70-80,000 people were said to have been killed in the three Roman cities devastated by Boudica and her bloodthirsty rebel army. Camulodunum (Colchester) and Verulamium (St Albans) – which had both been sizeable pre-Romanic settlements – were the main Roman bases at that point, and undoubtedly suffered worst. But there must have been casualties numbering into the thousands in Londinium too, which was itself a sizeable, important and wealthy city stretching to both banks of the Thames (archaeological excavations during the Jubilee line extension in the late 90s discovered evidence that Boudica’s forces crossed the river to sack the southern side too). In just 14 years, could Londinium have risen to become such a prominent and large Roman city – and a target for Boudica – unless a Britonic town was already established there by the time the Romans moved in?

The etymological origins of the title Londinium also may imply that a settlement there predated the arrival of the Romans. There are lots of exotic and false explanations for the roots of the name London – such as Monmouth’s idea, mentioned above, that it was taken from a mythical early English king. A leading professor of linguistics, Richard Coates, has come up with a slightly more academic – albeit still tenuous – theory. He believes that Londinium’s etymological roots may lie in a Celtic place-name derived from a pre-Celtic, Old European word, Lowonida, meaning “boat river” or “swimming river” – both likely titles for a settlement at a spot where the Thames is too wide to ford (i.e. London).

Guess work like this is the best we can do for now. Until Roman London is dug up in any large-scale, systematic way – and that seems highly-unlikely to ever happen – we’ll never be able to say with certainty just how far back into prehistory, if at all, London’s origins stretch.

Read or leave comments