Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 May 1891 — ANCIENT LONDON [ARTICLE]

ANCIENT LONDON

What Lies Beneath the Pavements of \ the Modern City. * Harper’s Magazine for May, To form a true conception of the Roman city we must sweep away all the accumulated results of modern art ands industry. We must create atabula rasa, and remove, as the mere figments of fancy, the Cathedral, the Abbey, the Tower, the swarming throngs of Cheapside, and the endless squares of brick buildings that shelter the millions of the London of to-day; dissolve the splendid vision, and think only of the past. Confined within the narrow limits of these walls, its greatest length the river-front, its greatest breadth between Cripplegate and the Thames, we see the Roman city. It is enclosed by a wall of stone-work andeement from twenty to thirty feet high. Towers or castella appear at intervals. It was built upon the plan of all other Roman cities, and resembled Pompeii or Lindum. Its four chief streets, at least forty feet wide, met in its forum; they were perfectly straight and free from sinuosities. The Roman engineers laid out their strata with unchanging regularity. Every street was paved with smooth stone, like those of Pompeii. Be neath the streets ran the sewers and water-pipes —we may assume—so invariably found in every Roman city. It i| impossible to determine Exactly the site of the London forum; it is only probable that there must have been one. We may, however, infer, from evidence too detailed and minute to enter upon here, that the forum stood upon the oldest part of Roman London, viz., south of Cornhill and east of the Mansion House. It is by no means certain that there was a forum. But an inscribed tile seems to show that the seat of government of the province was at London. Those, nowever, who consider the later imgortance of Roman London can ardly believe that it had no public buildings. At first an insignmeant town, although a port of some trade for more than two centuries it controlled the exports and imports of the entire island. Its wharves were filled with animation, its harbor with ships of burden. Ail the authorities point to London as a center of commercial activity. So complete Was the security in which South Britain remained for centuries, under the protection of Hadrian’s wall and the fortified cities of the west, that London was left without any other defence than a strong castle on the banks of the river until the age of Constantine. Unlike nearly all the other Roman cities, it had no walls, was unprotected even by a ditch and lay open on all sides to attack. At last, however, at some unknown period, but between the years 350 and 369, by some unknown hand, the Roman wall was built. Its extent may easily be traced; fragments of it still remain; and recently, at an excavation made by the railway company, a party of antiquarians were enabled to study and exploie more than one hundred feet in length of these ancient defences. Saxon and Dane, Norman and Englishman, have in the long course of fifteen centuries altered, overthrown, or rebuilt them; but their course and circuit was never changed. The Roman wall fixed the limit of the city, and its venerable fragments still recall the days when the last Roman legions marched down the Dover street, when Alfred restored the wall, or when Pym and Hampden found within its shelter the citadel of modern freedom.