The London of William Fitz Stephen
The Normans gave London many features that we should expect to find in a city. Already Edward the Confessor had
brought Norman masons to work on Westminster Abbey and had found an expensive answer to the lack of local quarries by
using fine, white stone from Caen. Under William and his sons the skyline grew more varied, with
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the White Tower in
the east and two more strongholds, Baynard's Castle and the Tower of Mountfitchet, in the west; still farther west,
past the bend in the river, Westminster Hall became the nucleus of a new palace next to the abbey.
St Paul's and most
of the parish churches were rebuilt on a grander scale. Religious houses were to loom large in the medieval scene,
because of their wealth, power, architectural splendour and civilizing influence. Before the Conquest there had been
none nearer than Barking, save the obscure bodies of priests which served St Paul's and St Martin-le-Grand, and the
monks at Westminster. Within months of William's entry St Martin-le-Grand was loaded with privileges. The first of
many new houses was founded at Southwark in 1106 and near Aldgate in the following year.
At about the same time the
earliest hospital, St Giles-in-the-Fields, was set up by the western highroad out of Newgate. There was probably a prison
on the east bank of the Fleet, north of the road out of Ludgate, by 1130.. London's oldest surviving
buildings are Norman.
London also grew rapidly as an international port. Foreign rulers demanded foreign luxuries; repeated Channel
crossings by the king and his barons gave more protection to travellers; order at home encouraged people to risk
journeys. Enterprising Norman merchants must have seen London, with its northern links, as a better centre than any
town in the duchy; there are no statistics but enough names to suggest that there were hundreds of French- speaking
settlers. Norse influence, still strong immediately after the Conquest, dwindled as the Baltic trade passed to the
Hanseatic League, so that by the 1120s Germans were the chief foreigners. Called at first `the men of Cologne', they
too were eventually allowed to trade anywhere in England. In 1157 they already had part of the site which they later
held rent free, as the Steelyard, and which is now covered by Cannon Street station.
Other strangers were more exotic. The king, who could stay at Westminster or the Tower, no longer needed the royal
`soke', a large area between what is now the Guildhall and the Mansion House. Part of this, around Ironmonger Lane,
was colonized by Jews, a hated minority existing on royal sufferance but undoubtedly adding to the city's wealth. After 1100 Jews also settled in the provinces but never so thickly as in London, where they could hope for protection
from the garrison in the Tower; until 1177 a plot outside Cripplegate was the only place in the kingdom where a Jew
might be buried.
Two quasi-monastic orders, the Knights of the Temple (the Templars) and the Knights of the Hospital
of St John of Jerusalem (the Hospitallers), reached England in the early twelfth century. Although they, too, were
to spread throughout the land, they made their headquarters beyond the western wall, the Templars at Holborn, from
which they later moved southward to the Temple, and the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell. For all foreigners, except new
religious orders seeking solitude, London was the strongest magnet.
Prospering citizens inevitably demanded more say in their own affairs, as well as in those of England. William the
Conqueror was followed by three other Norman kings, his strong-willed sons William Rufus and Henry I and his more
amiable grandson Stephen. In 1130 Henry I allowed the Londoners to choose their own sheriff and to assess and collect
their own taxes, paying a lump sum of 300 pounds a year, known as the farm; these privileges, although later withdrawn
and amended, were unique in England and a milestone on the road towards self-government.
Stephen, whose reign was
largely passed in civil war, received decisive support from London. Wealth had brought self-reliance and political power,
Norman London, like Saxon London, grew bigger over the decades, but it did not grow smoothly. Fire and tempest had
always been more familiar than invading armies. The menace must have increased with time, as the last Roman buildings
fell into ruin and gave way to rickety structures of timber, plaster and thatch. There was in fact no single city,
forever expanding, but a series of re -settlements, proof of human tenacity and the natural advantages of the site.
The Normans literally laid the foundations of a more lasting city, but, their contribution was only a beginning,
limited to castles and churches. It was a hundred years after the Conqueror's death before the first efforts at
town-planning were made, which included a ban on thatched roofs and an insistence on stone party-walls. How desperately
some regulation was needed is shown by the monotonous record of fires, which broke out in 1077, 1086-7, 1092, 1098, 1100,
1132 and 1135-6. In the first of these, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, `London was burned down ... worse
than ever it had been since it was founded', in the second St Paul's and the richest part of the city were consumed,
in the third a blaze swept westward from London Bridge, through the cathedral and beyond the walls to Aldwych.
Storms could be just as bad. On 17 October 1091 a south-easterly gale flattened over six hundred houses, destroyed
the bridge and whisked away the wooden roof of St Mary-le-Bow; a foreign visitor, hearing of this nine years
afterwards, tells of rafters hurled over fifty feet, and a later English writer says that beams twenty-six feet
long were buried in the earth so that only four feet could be seen.
Extract from “Medieval London”, Written by Timothy Baker. Cassell & Company Ltd, London:1970.
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