Lundenwic: The other medieval London

When northern European people came to London in the wake of the Roman empire’s collapse, they chose not to move into the city’s stone and brick buildings.

Instead, the people of early medieval England started their own town further west, outside the Roman city walls, in the area around present-day Covent Garden.

This was Lundenwic, an international trading town which flourished along the Strand from around 600 CE. It survived for around 250 years, then disappeared amid Viking raids.

In the early 400s CE, London was cut off from the Roman empire. Urban life collapsed. By the middle of that century, there were few people living within the city walls, the area we now call the City of London.

Around the same time, groups of northern Europeans began to arrive. Saxons and Angles from north-west Germany settled in eastern England. Jutes from Jutland in Denmark settled further north.

During the 500s CE, they established new kingdoms in England. The area north of the River Thames around London was part of the kingdom of the East Saxons.

Lundenwic was “the metropolis of the East Saxons”, according to Bede, a medieval monk and historian. During the reign of King Offa, between 757 and 796 CE, the town became part of the kingdom of Mercia.

From around 650 CE, Lundenwic sat on the north bank of the Thames in the area between the Strand and Oxford Street. That was no accident. Both were Roman roads that spanned the country and remained in use.

Lundenwic reached west, to where Trafalgar Square now is, and as far east as Aldwych. Most importantly, like Roman London, it had easy access to the River Thames and the sea beyond. ‘Wic’ means trading town in Old English, later becoming ‘wich’ in the names of ‘Greenwich’ and ‘Woolwich’.

During this period, the northern bank of the River Thames was further north than it is now. The Strand hugged close to the river and was Lundenwic’s main street. The word ‘Strand’ comes from the Old English for ‘beach’ or ‘bank’.

A church of St Paul was built inside the walls in 604 CE. But beyond that, the city was almost entirely abandoned and there are few archaeological finds from within the walls. Yet we know many Roman buildings remained standing.

Historians still aren’t exactly sure why the early medieval English people chose not to live inside the walls. It’s possible the shallow-sloping beach by the Strand was better suited to their trading boats. Maybe there weren’t enough people with experience of building and fixing stone buildings.

Some historians have also suggested that the crumbling Roman city may have seemed like a relic of a failed and foreign way of life, making it a spooky, unwelcoming place. One Old English poem described it as “the work of giants”.

Archaeologists first realised that early medieval London had shifted away from the Roman centre in 1988, when they found evidence of Lundenwic’s riverside embankments. Built from wood and wattle (a mixture of branches and clay), these embankments created a stable riverfront, making it easier to load and unload goods.

Writing in the early 700s CE, the monk Bede described Lundenwic as an “emporium”, and “a trading centre for many nations who visit it by land and sea”.

There was trade between the English kingdoms of Mercia, Northumberland and Kent, but also international trade. Amber from the Baltic has also been found at Lundenwic, as have millstones and large wine jars from the Rhineland, and pottery, glass and metalwork from northern France and Germany.

Silver coins minted in England and found in northern Europe tell us that ships carried goods and travellers the other way too.

Linen and woollen cloth were both made in Lundenwic, and we have a number of loom weights, spindle whorls and pin-beaters in our collection that were used in this process.

Archaeologists have found about 100 buildings, and some burials, in Lundenwic. It was crowded but organised, with homes and workshops laid out in a rough grid with gravelled main streets. They were timber-framed, with just one floor. The roofs were thatched or tiled with wooden shingles. The doors were mounted on iron hinges.

There’s evidence of weaving, bone-working and metalworking, but agriculture was clearly important too. Many people kept livestock in or near their homes.

One interesting site outside Lundenwic was the Ossulstone.

In the 600s and 700s CE, the stone marked a gathering place to negotiate, settle disputes, hand out justice and announce new laws.

This meeting point was on the spot where today you’d find Marble Arch. Until the 1700s, the same spot was home to Tyburn’s gallows, an infamous site for public executions.

The first recorded Viking raid on London was in 842, when English chronicles record a “great slaughter”.

More raids followed, soon becoming an invasion. In the winter of 871–872, Vikings camped in London, though we don’t know where. With international trade disrupted and the threat of raids hanging over it, Lundenwic was abandoned by the 880s.

But London evolved again. People began moving back inside the old Roman walls. In 886, the Saxon King Alfred reestablished London as a fortified town – a ‘burgh’ to create Londonburgh. The only memory of Lundenwic was a name – Aldwych – meaning the ‘old town’.