ABSTRACT
Here before turning to a summary account of the more significant dis coveries relating to post-Roman London something must be said on the problem of the ‘lost’ centuries-the period of a hundred years or so which followed the Roman withdrawal in the early fifth century a . d ., and during which, according to a widely accepted view, the city was abandoned. One of the outstanding negative results of the Excavation Council’s work
over more than sixteen years has been the absence of structural, or indeed any other, evidence for the occupation of London in the early part of the Saxon period. A feature of a number of sections has been the way in which finds other than Roman survivals have also been lacking. Since in 19351 Dr. (now Sir) Mortimer Wheeler listed by their periods
the chance finds of Saxon origin from the walled city and its immediate neighbourhood there have been few if any notable additions to the tally of objects falling within the period of the fifth to the eighth centuries. The number of such finds is in any case not a large one; but taken in conjunction with the distribution of churches whose dedications can be ascribed to the same period, their predominance in the area to the west of the Walbrook stream is the basis for the view that it was the western half of the city on which was centred the early Saxon recolonisation of London. Saxon London therefore developed in a direction which reversed that of the Roman occu pation, spreading eastwards at a later day to the Cornhill area, which in Roman times had constituted the original bridgehead settlement. This later development, taking place over the ninth to the eleventh centuries a . d ., is also illustrated in Wheeler’s maps. The absence of early Saxon discoveries referred to above is remarkable;
for, as has already been noted (p. 15), the western half of the city as the area in which the incidence of bomb-damage was much heavier than any where else, has also been the area in which most of the Council’s investiga tions have taken place. The first clearly defined chronological evidence, such as it is, in this region is consistently of later Saxon date. But again this
evidence is not associated with structural remains and is made up almost entirely of scattered sherds of painted ware of the type named after the kilns at Pingsdorf (near Cologne in the Rhineland), though it was not necessarily all produced there.1 This ware ranges in date from the mid-ninth to the late twelfth century. The evidence from the ground seems to indicate that the absence of early
Saxon remains is not due to the later destruction of the levels in which they would have occurred. Continued absence of early Saxon relics seems to corroborate the view that London was indeed largely unoccupied for some time after the collapse of the Roman power in the fifth century. The puzzling feature about this gap in the archaeological evidence is the contradiction that it embodies with the situation in London in the late sixth and early seventh centuries as implied by the records. The ordination of Mellitus as bishop of London in 604 and the building of the church of St. Paul by King Ethelbert must be taken to mark the renewal on some scale of the occupation of London by about a . d . 600.2 This would seem to be true even if this first attempt to establish Christianity in post-Roman London must be accepted as having failed. Yet the archaeological evidence seems to be consistent in showing no sign of life until more than 150 years later. The explanation of this apparent contradiction may be that the area of early Saxon occupation was much less extensive than has been thought. Is it possible that it was indeed limited to the immediate area of the western hill on which King Ethelbert built the first cathedral; and that even the limited expansion which would have carried traces of it to the margins of the hill did not take place until the ninth or tenth century? The hope was entertained that some part of the answer to these questions might be found in the large bombed area of Paternoster Row (26-9) immediately north of St. Paul’s Cathedral; but nothing bearing on the problem was found. In the meantime, it is in keeping with the evidence of the scattered finds
that the first structural remains of buildings should be relatively late in the period covered by the ‘Pingsdorf’ ware already mentioned.
