The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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think in the end, sir, that we conquered them. In a hundred years they were calling themselves kings of England.’ I suppose that is true; but for three hundred years the language of the elite in England became French, and the Anglo-Saxons were ruthlessly pushed down the social scale.
When William died he was not buried in London, but in his Norman home of Caen. He had become so fat that they could not fit him into the sarcophagus, and when the officiating bishop tried to push down on the lid his body burst, releasing such appalling vapours from his ventral cavity that the congregation swooned.
It seems unlikely that he was mourned by any of the four thousand Anglo-Saxon lords who lost their land, because the sad truth is that the Conquest was a nightmare for the Anglo-Saxons; and yet it was terrific for London.
Suppose it had been William, not Harold, who had taken one in the eye at Hastings. Or suppose that Ansgard the Staller had won the battle of London. Without the Norman Conquest the city would never have had the unity and peace that goes with firm government.
The chronicler tells us that under the Conqueror a young maiden could travel the length of England without being injured or robbed, and it is security that is the paramount condition for trade. Merchants from Caen and Rouen came over to buy and sell, and London flourished under its famous charter. It is an indication of the city’s favoured status under the Normans that it was not required to submit to the Domesday Book – even Winchester was eventually required to tot up its assets.
Norman London was to become emphatically and officially the capital of England – perhaps for the first time since the Romans. And William enshrined one reform that was crucial for the development of the city.
Edward the Confessor had originally moved the court from outside the Alfredian/Roman boundaries, because he wanted to oversee the rebuilding of the eighth-century West Minster monastery, which he turned into the Abbey. William not only decided to be crowned in the Abbey, but he established the Norman court – the centre of administration and justice – at Westminster.
So it was that London acquired its bicephalous identity, with the centre of political power at one remove from the centre of wealth.
Sometimes the moneymen have infuriated the politicians, and sometimes the politicians have egged on the mob against the moneymen. But for a thousand years London’s commercial district has had easy access to government – and yet been apart from it; and that semi-independence has surely contributed to the City’s commercial dynamism.
We have the Normans to thank for that, just as we can thank them for the rule of law, a series of socking great castles, and above all for adulterating the language so vigorously with French. If Harold had won at Hastings, or if Ansgard the Staller had held London, then we would never have been blessed with the hybrid language that was to conquer the world.
The success of that hybrid has been ascribed to the genius of our next great Londoner – the first in the series to have been actually born in the city.
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Just before we come to Chaucer, we must consider an important detail about his pilgrims. Think of them all: the fornicating friar, the randy old widow, the cook with the ginormous zit, the drunken miller, the pretentious prioress. If they came from London or anywhere north of the river, there was only one route to get to Canterbury, and that was my daily commuter trek. London Bridge was still the only crossing, and in the years of England’s Norman kings it was a very rickety affair.
We have seen that Olaf the Norwegian found it easy enough to pull it over with his rowers in 1014, and on ten occasions between that date and 1136 the bridge either collapsed or experienced a disastrous failure, and no wonder.
The population of the city had doubled between AD 1000 and 1200 – to more than twenty thousand. Across this wonky track went growing quantities of people and goods: wool from Dorset, wine from Deauville. It seems unlikely to have been more than six metres or ten metres across at the widest point, and there would scarcely have been room for two carts to pass abreast. Then in 1170 the decrepit Saxon piece of infrastructure faced a new load – a fresh rush of mediaeval commuters with their defecating horses and pounding heels.
Henry II had his row with Thomas à Becket about the power relationship between church and state. In one sense the argument ended decisively in Henry’s favour, as Cheapside-born Becket’s brains were splattered over the altar of Canterbury Cathedral. But in death the great Londoner was more powerful than in life. Henry made his penitential pilgrimage, and to the mediaeval mind that showed the triumph of God over the kings of the earth.
To mediaeval folk who believed in the literal truth of the licking tongues of hellfire, a pilgrimage of their own was a chance to win points with the almighty. Even greater numbers started to head for Canterbury. A priest called Peter de Colechurch, the chaplain of the church where Becket had been baptised, proposed a lasting solution.
What was needed, he told Henry II, was a stone bridge. The pilgrims and the holy blissful martyr deserved no less. Fed up with paying for repairs on the wooden structure, Henry agreed. The design appeared to be very expensive, so he announced a tax on wool and set up a monastic guild called the Brethren of London Bridge, who could raise cash through the sale of indulgences.
Even with these funding streams, the project proved almost too much for twelfth-century England. The river was 900 feet wide, strongly-flowing and tidal. The design required twenty stone piers, rising on vast ship-shaped stone starlings that rose from the river bed and jutted their prows into the current.
These days you would build a cofferdam, and pump the water out to allow the men to work on the bed of the river. That was beyond them.
Henry ran out of money and died; Peter de Colechurch was buried in the uncompleted foundations. Richard the Lionheart was too busy with the Crusades. After thirty years and the loss of one hundred and fifty lives, the project was finished by King John.
He did a cunning deal with the merchants of London. In exchange for loans to complete the bridge, they could have revenue from tolls and all future bridging rights over the Thames. These days we would call it a private finance initiative. London Bridge was completed in 1209, and was a huge popular hit. Houses and shops were built along it, with the eaves leaning together above the crowd. The congestion was so bad that sometimes it took the pilgrims an hour to cross.
On they struggled through the next one hundred and fifty years, with all the disasters of the Middle Ages – the little ice ages, the Black Death, the start of the One Hundred Years War with France.
They went to see the shrine of the martyr, because they believed he could help relieve them of their aches and miseries, but there were times when the people’s feeling of oppression was so great that the consolation of religion was not enough.
The father of English – now the unofficial common language of humanity
It was Wednesday 12 June 1381, the time of year when England is almost at its loveliest. The brief candles were still on the chestnuts, and the evenings were getting longer as the midsummer climax approached.
A fat and slightly depressed author of about forty was sitting at the window of his flat and starting to feel alarmed. His wife was away, as usual, at the court of John of Gaunt, and we have some reason to suspect that her relations with the great prince were not beyond reproach. As for our hero, it was only a year ago that he had himself been implicated in a discreditable liaison, in the form of the ‘raptus’ of a young woman called Cecily Champain.
Whatever the exact connotations of this charge – from which he managed to exonerate himself by paying a fine – it cannot have done wonders for his reputation or his morale. He had a good job, as Comptroller of the Wool Custom and Subsidy of the Petty Customs, and had established a reputation as a poet. Indeed he still beats le Douanier Rousseau as the greatest artist ever to have been a customs officer. In addition to his £10 annuity from the King’s