ABSTRACT
‘Food supplies in large quantities’, says Gordon Home, in his Roman London, ‘had to be brought in daily to the markets of Londinium, and, apart from oil and wine, it may be taken that at first nearly all requirements were produced within a short radius.’ ‘Platter’ is obviously Latin platea, ‘a street’; and ‘Pewter Platter’ means ‘the street where the open space round the well is’. The various ‘Michaels’, then, record the presence of markets throughout Londinium – again the map shows that they were fairly evenly distributed, and that each of the original Londons had its own market. The name of the eastern ‘horn’ survives in the name ‘Cornhill’; that of the western in the name of a now vanished church which stood, until 1666, at the extreme western end of Cheapside, between Blow Bladder Street north and Paternoster Row south.
