The Inner Temple Yearbook 2021–2022
Gilds and Things: Keeping the Peace in 10th-Century London
GILDS AND THINGS: KEEPING THE PEACE IN 10TH-CENTURY LONDON Dr Rory Naismith (Lecturer in the History of England before the Norman Conquest in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College). Webinar on Tuesday 4 May 2021.
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‘Harley Psalter’ (British Library Harley MS 603, f. 59v), a copy of the Psalms made at Canterbury Cathedral in the early 11th century
If I were speaking to you in person, we would be situated in the pleasant environs of the Temple Church and the law courts. We would be roughly on the boundary of the City of London. Going back a little further, we would also be in what was a sort of no man’s land between the two centres of early medieval and Anglo-Saxon London. This was emphatically not the heart of a big city. But if we were to lift our gaze and look to the west, we would have looked towards Lundenwic: a new urban settlement that emerged in the seventh century, situated in the area between Trafalgar Square and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Relative to other settlements of the day, Lundenwic was a major concentration of population, production and trade. It was more a permanent market than a town as we would understand it in institutional terms. And there’s little evidence that it had much of a sort of communal character or identity. Still, there were precious few places like it anywhere in northern Europe, and it was probably one of the biggest permanent or semi-permanent settlements anywhere in Britain.
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Lundenwic flourished between the seventh and ninth centuries. To trace what happened next, we would need to cast our mind’s eye towards the formidable walls of Roman Londinium. In the middle and later years of the ninth century, people started to gravitate into the Roman city once again, possibly under the pressure of Viking attacks, possibly as part of a kind of gradual spreading out and eastward shuffle of Lundenwic. There is a key figure who comes into play at this point: Alfred the Great. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that, in 886, Alfred came to London, refurbished its defences, and used it as a base for a ceremonial submission of all the English who were not subject to the Vikings, before he entrusted it to Ethelred, who was the leader of the Mercians, under Alfred’s overlordship. Alfred did not rebuild London from scratch, but in his time, it did start to develop a much stronger unitary identity, best represented by the involvement of the city’s population in military campaigns against the Vikings.
