Old East Enders

A History of the Tower Hamlets

Jane Cox

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780750952910
• eBook ISBN: 9780750956291
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Old East Enders tells East London's story from Roman Shadwell to the present day, focusing on the little-told story of the medieval and early modern Tower Hamlets. Jane Cox, the former Principal Assistant Keeper of Public Records, is an experienced author and lecturer, and her immensely readable and entertaining new book takes in recent archaeological research and a whole range of new record research. A wide range of fascinating and in some cases previously unpublished illustrations further enliven the text, which illuminates the history of this part of London as never before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Part I

LONDON’S OLDEST SUBURB

from earliest times to c. 1500

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Chapter 1

OLDER THAN LONDON ITSELF

Prehistory, Romans and Saxons

The very first Londoner of whom we have mortal remains happens to be an ‘East Ender’, a Neolithic lass whose skeleton was recently found in Blackwall, lying on her left, curled round in a foetal position, with a pot and a flint knife. She was buried there about 6,000 years ago, but there are signs of human life around London stretching back many millions of generations before that.

Humans, or something like humans, first appeared in the London area in about 400,000 BC, when the weather was Mediterranean and a land bridge joined Britain to the Continent. In those days lions roared in Limehouse, bears roamed in Bethnal Green, rhinoceroses in Ratcliff, elephants in East Smithfield and Neanderthals, smaller than us, seriously carnivorous, with beetling brows and receding chins, hunted by chasing herds of animals to their death over cliffs or into marshes. Traces of these near-human creatures have been found in Rainham and Woodford.

Over thousands of years it got colder and colder, and the land was covered with ice. The Neanderthals probably retreated to southern Europe, returning about 60,000 years ago to hunt the woolly mammoths, reindeer and horses that now lived in the British arctic tundra, where winter temperatures might be as low as −25°C. By c. 30,000 BC they had died out and were replaced by modern humans who, it is thought, originated in Africa. By c. 13,000 BC Britain had warmed into fruitful life, and the vast freezing plains were covered first in pine forests and then with oak and birch. People lived in the Thames and Lea valleys more or less continually from this distant era, only forced to retreat to higher ground when, about 8,500 years ago, the sea rose, submerging the area and turning Britain temporarily into a group of islands.

Archaeologists have found evidence of the earliest British homo sapiens living in the early Neolithic period (8,000–3,000 BC) around London, in Essex at Rainham, Ilford, Upminster and Dagenham. Semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, they built wooden huts to live in, mainly on the river terraces, and hunted the roe, wild cattle, red deer and boar which ran in the forests. Between 3,500 and 350 BC farming started, the growing of cereals and the herding of cattle; clearings were made in the forests and something like villages started to dot the land. Traces of enclosures have been found to the west of London, with entrances aligned with the setting or rising sun. In the east a late Neolithic (3,500–2,500 BC) trackway has been found in Silvertown, and a handful of burnt grains of wheat in Canning Town hint at early arable farming. There are signs of the beginnings of the human preoccupation with an afterlife, as people, like the Blackwall lass, started to be buried with equipment for their journey into the great unknown. The river Thames, which provided so many of the necessities of life, became an object of veneration, and votive gifts were thrown into the waters to gratify or appease the powerful spirits.

By the late Bronze Age, (1,000–750 BC), when women wove woollen cloth and men fashioned fine metal utensils and ornaments, the countryside was beginning to have an appearance that we might recognise, with field systems and hedges planted to divide farm from farm. At some point river levels appear to have risen again, and wooden tracks were built across the new marshy meadows: on the Isle of Dogs a timber platform was recently discovered at Atlas Wharf. At Old Ford, where the river Lea was readily crossable and where there are hints of a much older settlement, there grew up a village, presumably a collection of round huts, with perhaps a forge, where Lefevre Walk now is. Signs of Bronze Age life have been found in Stepney village and in Bromley.

So, before the Romans came to Rye, and before there was any London, or any London of significance, there had been habitation in the ‘East End’ going back deep into the Celtic twilight and beyond. The gravel soils of Stepney, Bow and Bethnal Green, lying on top of London clay, lightly wooded with oak and beech, interspersed with glades and open grasslands, were among the most fertile in the south of England. The woods were easily cleared to make cornfields and the oak trees provided food for pigs and timber for building. In the alluvial parts, Wapping and the Isle of Dogs, where river mud was deposited, there was excellent pasture when water levels were low.

Lying as it did between two navigable tidal rivers, the Thames and the Lea, our area was a good place to live; it was easy to travel around by boat, to trade with neighbours and continental Europe; and there was a plentiful supply of water not just from the rivers but from abundant springs and wells, as at Shadwell. This and others were on the edge of the flood plain, where the water that has sunk through the gravel around, unable to permeate the clay below, trickles along until it can find a way out. The whole triangle of land was criss-crossed with streams. The brook (hence Brook Street in Poplar) that was to be christened the Black Ditch in the eighteenth century rose near Spitalfields, crossed the Mile End Road at Cambridge Heath Road, then ran along north of Stepney church, turning south to join the Thames at Limehouse Dock. Another short stream rose in Wellclose Square, ran along Nightingale Lane (now Sir Thomas More Street) and into the Thames at Crassh Mills in Wapping. One rose in the gravel near Shadwell Well (where St Paul’s Shadwell now stands); another started in Bromley and crossed Poplar High Street; another rose in Goodman’s Fields (Whitechapel) and ran south into the Thames where now Tower Bridge stands.

By the time of the first Roman invasions (55 and 54 BC) this rich and watery place was well settled, and, as all over the country, the people of what we call the Iron Age were organised into tribes or embryonic kingdoms. According to Roman sources these were warlike bands of rough folk, recent immigrants from northern Gaul, whose so-called towns were timber fortresses in thickets defended with ditches and banks. Their villages were collections of large round dwellings, with barns for storage of grain and stockades for beasts; their gods were the wee folk of good and evil, spirits lurking in trees and springs, hobgoblins, animal-headed men and squinting hunchbacks. From their headquarters far away in Anglesey the powerful priests and judges, the Druids, held some considerable sway over all the tribes in the Midlands and south-east, supervising wide-scale human sacrifice. In this fierce world of faery and wickermen, into which the great Caesar marched his legions, the site of Greater London seems to have been peripheral to the politics of the time, a sort of no-man’s land lying where four kingdoms met. These were the territories of three major Belgic tribes: the Trinovantes of Essex, with a capital near Colchester, the Catuvellauni (‘good in battle’), of Hertfordshire, the Atrebates, to the west, with their fortress at Silchester, and in Kent the Cantiaci. Overlooking the fields and marshes to the east of London’s site, in what is now Ilford, rose an enormous fortress, at 60 acres one of the largest in Britain, with ramparts 20ft high, towering over Barking Creek and watching over the valley. Built in the second century BC, Uphall Camp marks the boundary of Trinovantes territory, guarding Essex from the Catuvellauni, who ruled from their headquarters at Wheathampstead.

It was the ambition of the Catuvellauni that brought Julius Caesar to these shores, or was at least his excuse for intervention. Invited by the Trinovantes to protect them from their neighbours, he trounced the aggressors, with their 4,000 war chariots and, having received their submission, retired, leaving the Celtic warlords to their own devices. By the time of the Claudian colonisation of Britain, some hundred years later, Cunobelin (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline), King of the Catuvellauni, had forged a new kingdom, adding to his possessions in Hertfordshire, South Cambridgeshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire the Essex territory of the Trinovantes and that of the Cantiaci in Kent. His sons, Caractacus and Togodomus, ruled this wide domain from Camulodunum (Colchester), the old Trivonantes’ fortress. So when Aulus Plautius, commander of the emperor’s forces, led the invasion of Britain in AD 43, the British capital at Colchester was the focus of the attack – and Tower Hamlets was on his route. Our entry into the historical East End starts with the glittering and terrifying martial rhythm of the legions, marching from the Thames to the Lea, led by the Emperor Claudius, the youthful Vespasian at his side, with elephants, horses and soldiers crashing through the shallows at Old Ford.

Although Roman sources are not specific enough about topography to allow us to trace the invaders’ route exactly, it is almost certain that the Romans used the Old Ford to cross the Lea. Aulus Plautius and his troops landed in Kent, fought their way to the Thames, which they crossed, possibly at Greenwich or perhaps 1 mile to the west of the City, where the roads to Verulamium and Canterbury align, and where the river might be crossed through about 5ft of water at low tide. There, having got into difficulties, they camped and awaited the arrival of Claudius from Italy, at least six weeks later. There followed a victorious march to Colchester and the annexation of Britain to the Empire.

Much rests on the account of Roman historian Dio Cassius, not least regarding the founding of London itself, so it is worth quoting the relevant passage in full:

The Britons withdrew to the Thames at a point where it flows into the sea and at high tide forms a lake. This they crossed with ease since they knew precisely where the ground was firm and the way passable. The Romans, however, in pursuing them, got into difficulties here. Once again the Celts swam across, while others crossed by a bridge a little way upstream and they engaged the enemy from several sides at once, cutting many of them down. However, in pursuing the garrisons without due precautions, they got into marshes from which it was difficult to find a way out and lost a number of men.

According to R.G. Collingwood the swamps they got lost in were those of the numerous branches of the lower Lea. This may or may not have been the case; Dio Cassius was writing at least 150 years after the event. No firm conclusions can be drawn as to where they crossed the Thames, although their camp was presumably on the twin hills that grew speedily into Londinium, and within two decades was, according to Tacitus, a flourishing city. The probability of the army using the ancient ford over the Lea, however, is very high; it was the obvious route to take. The emperor’s forces needed to cross the river to get to Colchester, and there was an ancient turf chariot trackway that led there, passing through the river at Old Ford. Westwards it probably followed the line of Bethnal Green Road, Old Street and so into Oxford Street, thence running towards the major settlement at Brentford and on to the capital of the Atrebates at Silchester.

Within ten years or so of the invasion this road, more ancient than any of the City’s streets, was made into a three-lane highway, Roman style. It appears to have stayed in use until Bow Bridge was built at Stratford in the twelfth century. In 1845 traces of the old road were discovered, running closely parallel to today’s Roman Road, where a colourful market has sold the necessities and fripperies of life to East Enders since 1888. Masses of Roman herringbone masonry found in the bed of the Lea nearby indicates that there was a paved ford here, and very recent excavations at nearby Le Fevre Walk and Parnell Road have placed the ribbon development along this road and around the river crossing among the major inhabited sites in the London area both in Roman and pre-Roman times.

So the village of Old Ford is older than London itself – perhaps. There is, to date, no archaeological evidence of any pre-Roman settlement where the great port grew, which was to fashion and finally absorb the hamlets between the Thames and the Lea. On the face of it this seems unlikely, as the ‘square mile’ offered a prime site, a natural fort on twin hills that rose above the largest river in the country, set in a wide, fertile valley and naturally embanked with steep gravel banks. It was an excellent spot for landing ships and men and for lively trade with the Continent, which was much in evidence in the decades before Roman colonisation. According to Stow it was chosen as the ‘royal city’ because it ‘reaches furthest into the belly of the land’ and ‘openeth indifferently upon France and Flanders’. The entomology of its name is debatable; traditionally it was thought to derive from Llyndin, meaning a lake fort; these days it is said to derive from Plowonida, which means a river that is too wide to ford. Either way it is an ancient British name, which might argue that there was a settlement there, although the Romans are said to have adopted indigenous names for new towns in conquered territories. The most significant evidence for a pre-Roman settlement at London is the fact that, according to Tacitus, there was a flourishing city there within eighteen years of Plautius’s arrival. From a mere camp arose, in an astonishingly short time, a new town, an oppidum ‘celebrated for the gathering of dealers and commodities’.

When considering the origins of London or, indeed, the prehistory of its east side, it is worth remembering that archaeology has only evolved recently into a serious and systematic pursuit. Although our forebears were fascinated by accidental finds, as John Stow was by the discovery of a Roman vessel still containing liquid in Spitalfields in 1576, it is really only since the 1920s that it has become a scientific study, bolstered by new dating methods. In the 1860s Colonel Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers) thought he had discovered the remains of the London ‘lake fortress’ of Cassivellaunus, Caesar’s protagonist, in pile structures on the banks of the Wallbrook. In 1928 Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s investigations revealed that it was no such thing, being Roman works of a much later date. The western market area of Lundenwic, now thought to be the main site of Saxon London, was only discovered in 1985 at the Aldwych (old market). As we have seen, ongoing excavations at Old Ford are revealing a continuity of occupation since the Bronze Age, and this, with discoveries made at Shadwell since 1975, have quite changed the traditional view of the Roman East End. The story of London may shift at any moment. Sir Christopher Wren noted some Roman work below the foundations of the medieval cathedral when he was building St Paul’s; who knows what lies beneath that?

As legends have a comforting way of turning out to be true, or partially true, it should be remembered, that, in medieval and early modern times London was believed to have been a great city 1,000 years before the Romans came, founded in 1,074 BC by one Brutus, great-grandson of Virgil’s Aeneas. Like Rome itself, London was the creation of a fugitive from Troy. A Welsh bishop, Geoffrey of Monmouth, composed a History of the Kings of Britain in the twelfth century, based on ‘lost’ sources and oral traditions. According to this book, Brutus’s city, New Troy or Nova Troia, was the city of Trinovant to which Caesar refers. The name London was coined when it was rebuilt by one King Lud, remembered in Ludgate. This story, presumably written to elevate London by giving it both a classical and Celtic pedigree, was eagerly accepted and held sway for some 400 years. It only began to be questioned in the sixteenth century, when it was observed that the chronicler had used a misunderstanding of Caesar’s word civitas, thinking that he had referred to a city rather than the territory of the Trinovantes. Nevertheless the story still hung around: in 1805 Thomas Pennant, in his serious Some Account of London, refers to the Celtic lake city. Even today, even though scholars have long dismissed the tale of King Lud’s topless towers, you may find some version of it repeated in websites whose authors seek, as did that journalist monk, to find a fine and fancy ancestry for the City that in due course superseded Rome as the greatest city in the world.

The Romans said they founded London, and as far as we can tell at present they seem to have done so, with archaeological evidence dating it to c. AD 50. Ten or eleven years later the Old Ford witnessed a scene probably even more awesome to the locals than the advance of the legions, when the terrible, tall, tawny-haired Queen of the East Anglian Iceni, Boudicca, led her army of 100,000 men, women and children crashing through the Lea. You can see her, magnificent in a war chariot, just by Westminster Bridge.

Boudicca’s husband had left a will leaving the client kingdom of the Iceni divided between his two daughters and Emperor Nero, hoping thereby to secure inheritance for his dynasty. At his death the reverse happened; the Romans plundered his kingdom, had his widow publicly flogged and his daughters brutally raped. The queen, in revenge, raised an army and led in person the only sustained resistance against the invaders in all their time in Britain. The revolt focussed first on Camulodunum, now settled with Roman army veterans, where thousands were slaughtered and buildings were burnt to the ground. She and her troops then turned towards London; they would have taken the established route through the Lea at Old Ford. Tacitus writes in his Annals:

Suetonius [the Roman governor, who was in Anglesey suppressing the Druids] … marched amidst a hostile populati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Introduction London’s Backyard
• PART I LONDON’S OLDEST SUBURB
• Chapter 1 Older than London Itself: Prehistory, Romans and Saxons
• Chapter 2 The Tower and its Hamlets, 1066–1200
• Chapter 3 The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green and Chaucer’s East End, 1200–1400
• Chapter 4 Foreigners, Floods and Fighting: the Fifteenth Century
• PART II UNDER THE TUDORS AND STUARTS
• Chapter 5 The Tudors, 1500–1600
• Chapter 6 The Stuarts, 1603–1689
• PART III THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
• Chapter 7 The East End Surveyed
• Chapter 7 The East End Surveyed (Part 2)
• Postscript From Docks to Docklands
• Sources
• Plates
• Copyright