ABSTRACT
Martin Biddle and Daphne Hudson with Carolyn Heighway produced a report setting out these circumstances in detail, supported by maps that demonstrated graphically the rate of destruction of archaeological evidence in the City of London. It had been forestalled a few months earlier by a simpler but equally effective report, Archaeology in the City of London — an Opportunity, presented to the Corporation of London by the newly-appointed Director of Guildhall Museum, Max Hebditch. In the absence of trade or any economic basis beyond mere subsistence, it is not surprising that our archaeological evidence of life in London is negative for the period 450–600. The sparseness of archaeological evidence from the four centuries was attributed by Martin Biddle in 1973 to the less conspicuous character of Anglo-Saxon buildings, and the tendency of archaeologists ‘to concentrate upon the study of Roman London without an equal regard for the archaeology of the city’s subsequent periods’.
