The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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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 bones, 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 mediaeval 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 far-sighted 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. Here, 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 see-saw 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.
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 cark, 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 in 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 paid to the endless 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 donjons 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 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