Thread by @holland_tom

Today is St Cuthbert’s Day, & - since I am unable to head for Durham or Lindisfarne – how better to celebrate it than by going on an insanely long walk in search of the scattered trace elements of #AngloSaxonLondon?

Anglo-Saxon London lacks the physical traces that makes a walk round Roman London so satisfying. For all that, though, it offers its own pleasures. Place-names, street-plans, churches: the stamp of the early Middle Ages can be found on them across the city.

“Anglo-Saxon London,” @Rory_Naismith writes, “is not reflected in any monuments that still stand today. Like Conrad’s London, it sits in a well-known landscape but hovers just out of our grasp in the shadow.”

So my walk today will be a grasping after shadows...

London’s Anglo-Saxon history is a game of 2 halves. First: the Roman city is largely abandoned, & the centre of commercial activity moves to what is now the Strand: ‘Lundenwic’. Second: in the 9th century the Roman city is 'restored' by Alfred as a fortress/market: 'Lundenburh'

The pattern of streets in what was once Roman London derives not from the Romans but from the Anglo-Saxons. “Anglo-Saxon London is a much more direct ancestor fo the modern metropolis than its Roman predecessor" - @Rory_Naismith

Even so, the Roman remains cotinued to impress. In 839, a bishop hailed it as “that famous place built by the skill of the ancient Romans & known commonly throughout all the spaces of the earth as the city of London.”

The new Assassin's Creed makes play with this.

Beyond the old Roman city, & beyond the emergent settlement of Lundenwic, across what is now Greater London, traces are to be found everywhere of Anglo-Saxon settlements: farms, assembly points, trading centres. Indeed, I live in one myself!

Brixton: recorded in 1062 as Brixiges stan, ‘the stone of Beorhtsige’ – the stone probably being an assembly point for the hundred court of Surrey. Since such assembly points were generally on high ground, the stone of Beorhtsige presumably stood on Brixton Hill.

Dulwich: recorded in a 967 charter issued by Edgar the Peaceable* as Dilwihs, ‘marshy meadow with dill [a white flower] grows’. In 1066 it was owned by Harold Godwinson, then by William I.

*So called because he hanged people who broke the peace, not because he was a hippy.

Peckham: recorded in the Domesday Book as Pecheham, a homestead by the river Peck. Following the Norman Conquest it had come into the possession of William I’s half-brother Odo of Bayeux, who in turn granted it to the Bishop of Lisieux.

Greenwich: recorded in a charter of 918 as Gronewic, ‘green trading emporium.’ Notorious in the annals of Anglo-Saxon London for a particularly shocking murder...

St Alphege’s. He was archbishop of Canterbury during the dark days of Æthelred the Unready’s reign. Captured by Vikings after the storming of Canterbury in 1011, he was held prisoner for 7 months, then pelted to death with ox bones by his drunken captors at Greenwich.

'Then was he a captive, who had been the head of the English race and of Christianity; there wretchedness might be seen where bliss had often been seen before, in that wretched town from where there first came to us Christianity & joy before God & the world!' – A-Saxon Chronicle

The Vikings killed Alphege because he had refused to allow a ransom to be paid for his release. They kept his corpse but then, when a stick immersed in his blood suddenly sprouted blossom, they were brought to repentance, & released his body.

Alphege was buried at St Paul’s, but in 1023 his body was taken by ship to Canterbury. The ship was a Viking one: Cnut, the Danish conqueror of England, had become a devout Christian, & joined with his English subjects in hailing Alphege as a martyr.

St Peter’s in Ghent also held Woolwich - where I am heading now!

https://twitter.com/MGebbett/status/1373210758394314753

The churches of London, more than any museum, are the guardians of living traditions reaching back to the beginnings of Christianity in England #AngloSaxonLondon

https://twitter.com/sjeffrey01/status/1373219878346358785

For all your building-arches-in-7th-century-churches needs! #AngloSaxonLondon

Woolwich: recorded in 918 as Uuluuich, ‘a trading emporium dealing in wool’. An early Christian burial site dating from the 7th century was found here in 2015 – 76 skeletons in all. Another A-Saxon grant to the abbey of St Peter’s in Ghent - perhaps by Alfred’s daughter Ælfthryth

Barking: recorded in a charter of 735 as Berecingum, meaning either ‘settlement of the descendants of Bereca’ or ‘dwellers among the birch trees’.

Barking Abbey was founded by St Earconwald, who was perhaps of Kentish royal descent, & subsequently became Bishop of London, in the 660s or 670s. He simultaneously founded an abbey in Chertsey. Barking was a double monastery: for men & women.

The first abbess of Barking was St Æthelburh (aka Ethelburga) who was much admired by Bede: “she always bore herself in a manner worthy of her brother the bishop, upright of life and constantly planning for the needs of her community, as heavenly miracles attest.”

Barking Abbey was a great centre of female learning – indeed, it has been described as ‘perhaps the longest-lived ... institutional centre of literary culture for women in British history’.

Here is @ClerkofOxford, a scholar in the abbey’s best tradition. historytoday.com/archive/out-ma…

The abbey was demolished following its dissolution by Henry VIII. All that remains is the Curfew Tower, one of the abbey’s three gateways, built in the mid 15th century. Today, the site is one of those places that makes it easy to equate the Reformation with vandalism.

The Curfew Gate still serves as a gateway - to St Margaret’s Church. The church preserves a fragment of the shaft of a Saxon carved cross - but, alas, is shut.

Captain Cook, I learn, was married there...

A memorial to the vanished abbey of Barking in the Curfew Tower

(A sombre number of likes for this thread, I see!)

Right - westward ho to Lundenburh!

West Ham: ‘Hamme’ is first mentioned in a charter of 958. It means 'a dry area of land between rivers or marshland' - the rivers in this case being the Thames, the Lea & the Roding.

Stepney: first mentioned c. 1000. Stybbanhyð - 'Stybba's landing place' - conjures up romantic images of a Saxon adventurer arriving off whatever Limehouse was called back then, and navigating the river that would one day come to be called the Black Ditch.

St Dunstan’s in Stepney - “The Mother Church of the East End", & miraculously spared in the Blitz - was founded in 952, on the site of an earlier church. Its eponymous founder was one of the great men of the 10th century: scholar, reformer, archbishop of Canterbury.

St Dunstan, as the story goes,
Once pull'd the devil by the nose
With red-hot tongs, which made him roar,
That he was heard three miles or more.

I arrive at @AllHallowsTower: it is, although almost nothing remains of the original Saxon foundation, the oldest church in the City. In 1940, a 7th century arch that had been concealed behind the organ was exposed when incendiary bombs fell on the church. It has Roman tiles.

The crypt is full of treasures. As well as a Roman pavement there are various fragments of Anglo-Saxon sculpture: Christ trampling down 2 monsters, the head of a cross (‘Thelvar had this set up’), & 2 Byzantine-style peacocks - symbols of eternal life.

All Hallows was also known in the Middle Ages as ‘Berkyncherche’ – so the presumption is that it was founded by Earconwald & given to Barking Abbey. As such, it constitutes a living & precious link to the traditions of Barking Abbey.

Hugely grateful to @KHedderly for opening up her church for me. Here she is with a recently painted icon of Saint Æthelburh, the first abbess of Barking & a great patron of learning. She holds medicinal herbs: for she healed the sick in a time of plague.

@ClerkofOxford

Gone but not forgotten...

London Bridge. Olaf Haraldsson, future king of Norway & saint, is supposed to have pulled it down when he helped Ethelred the Unready reconquer London from the Danes. The feat features in skaldic verse (although not, perhaps tellingly, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.)

London Bridge is broken down,
Gold is won and bright renown.
Shields resounding
War Horns Sounding,
Hildur shouting in the din!
Arrows singing,
Mailcoats ringing –
Odin makes our Olaf win!

Queenhythe is the only remnant of the docks built by Alfred following his ‘restoration’ of London in 886. It was originally called Æthelred’s hythe (= landing-place). Æthelred was the ‘Lord of the Mercians’’: husband of Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd, who became Lady of the Mercians

“When the East Saxons had been evangelised thanks to the preaching of Mellitus, King Ethelbert built a church dedicated to the holy Apostle Paul in the city of London, which he appointed as the episcopal see of Mellitus and his successors” - Bede

St Mellitus was the first bishop of London, but he fled the city for Gaul when the East Saxons apostasised in 616. When he returned to England, he did so as Archbishop of Canterbury, not of London, as had been the plan. The city remained pagan until 675.

The first bishop of London appointed in 675 was Erkenwald, the founder of Chertsey & Barking abbeys, & brother of Æthelburh. The line of bishops has remained unbroken ever since. Erkenwald died in 693: he was buried in St.Paul’s & in due course commemorated as a saint.

Two Anglo-Saxon kings are also known to have been buried in St Paul’s: Saebbi, King of the East Saxons, who was converted by Erkenwald, & Ethelred the Unready. These tombs for them were built in the 12th century, etched in 1658, and destroyed in the Great Fire.

St Bride’s was reputedly founded by St Bridget herself in the 6th century. More probably, it was established – perhaps under Irish influence – in the 7th century. It was built among Roman ruins, in a city still haunted by banished gods.

Aldwych (‘the old emporium) was where, after Roman London had become a ghost town, commerical activity began to recover c. AD 600. Lundenwic – ‘London’s emporium’ – was described by Bede as "a trading centre for many nations who visit it by land and sea".

Covent Garden. Excavations here in 1985 & 2005 revealed that London in the 7th & 8th centuries had been – by the standards of the age – a substantial settlement. The Vikings inflicted a “great slaughter” on it in 842, then sacked it again in 851.

St Martin-in-the-Fields stands on top of a cemetry that dates back to the 5th century: the twilight years of Roman London. It seems to have continued as a place for burials well into the Anglo-Saxon period. In 2006 a headless late Roman skeleton was found in a stone sarcophagus.

Westminster Abbey stands on what was once Thorney Island, which in 785 was (perhaps) granted by Offa of Mercia “to St Peter & the needy people of God in the terrible place which is called Westminster.” St Dunstan in the 10th century restored & reformed the abbey.

Edward the Confessor moved his palace to Westminster & began building a massive new abbey to the east of the earlier building. Based on the evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry, it had a central tower & transepts. It was built on an unprecedented scale.

Traces of the original abbey were found in the presbytery in 1866 & the nave in 1930. “These served to establish that the internal length of the 11th century church was over 320 ft, not much short of the present length of the abbey.”

Westminster Abbey is where, on Christmas Day 1066, William of Normandy was crowned King of England - as suitable note as any on which to conclude my tour of #AngloSaxonLondon.

Thank you for following it!

And now to make my footsore way back to Brixiges stan, & home...

29 miles!

https://twitter.com/alexbirsan/status/1373338740697993217

If you enjoyed this thread, I hope you won't mind a cheeky request: to consider sponsoring me on a walk I am doing across London, from one side of the M25 to the other.

The details are here: givergy.uk/tomholland/?co…

It is all in aid of three incredibly deserving charities.

Thank you.

tomhollandbenefit2021.com/charities