trinovantum.doc 1

from Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981) 135-51

Trinovantum – the evolution of a legend

John Clark

Antiquitie is pardonable, and hath an especial priuiledge, by interlacing diuine matters with

humane, to make the first foundation of Cities more honourable, more sacred, and as it were

of greater maiestie.

John Stow, 1603, after Livy (Kingsford 1908a: 1)

The ‘first foundation’ of the city of London is a subject which has stimulated the interest of

generations of its historians. For nearly five hundred years from the early twelfth century, the

account given by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia regum Britanniae was accepted with

little reservation: the city was founded long before the Romans came to Britain, as

‘Trinovantum’ or ‘New Troy’, by a group of Trojan settlers under the leadership of Brutus,

great-grandson of Aeneas, who gave his name to the island of Britain and its people (Fig. 1).

Even after the recognition of Geoffrey’s work as largely fabrication, and the demise of

the traditional ‘British history’, historians of London seemed reluctant to accept the

implication of the complete lack of historical or archaeological evidence for a pre-Roman

settlement on the site of the city: the implication that London came into existence only

between the Roman invasion of AD 43 and the first mention of it as a town of merchants in

AD 60 (Merrifield 1965:36). Instead, they sought in its name a Celtic Llyn Din (‘Lake-fort’),

a Llong Dinas (‘Ship-city’) or even a Llan Dyn (‘Temple of Diana’) (Davis 1926: 227-8).

Wooden piles found in the valley of the Walbrook, the stream that formerly ran through the

midst of the city, were accepted as the remains of a British ‘lake-village’, indeed the capital

of the British king Cassivellaunus who had led the resistance to Julius Caesar in 55 and 54

BC (Lane-Fox 1867). The few pieces of imported Roman pottery, reportedly found in

London, that date before AD 43 were taken as evidence for the existence of a trading

settlement before the Roman conquest (Pryce and Oswald 1928).

The derivation of the name Londinium, though clearly Celtic, remains obscure (Jackson

1953: 308; Rivet and Smith 1979: 397-8). As Mortimer Wheeler pointed out (1928: 19-20),

the Walbrook pile-structures were of Roman date, while Marsh (1979) has shown good

reason for doubting the ‘London’ provenance of the early pottery in the Museum of London

and British Museum collections, and has identified it as foreign material brought in by

nineteenth-century dealers and passed off as genuine London finds to enhance its value.

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Wheeler’s conclusion (1928: 27) was that “there is at present no valid reason for supposing

that London existed prior to AD 43”. Merrifield (1965: 29-32) agreed, and intensive

archaeological investigation since has produced nothing to change the picture. Such

consistently negative evidence is difficult to ignore.

Yet the possibility remains that there had existed, not on the site of the Roman city but at

some little distance from it, an earlier London – perhaps Celtic *Lōndonion? (Jackson 1953:

308) – one of those fortified British tribal centres which the Romans called oppida (Wacher

1975: 36). Though a number of Roman towns – Verulamium, St Albans (Wacher 1975: 202-

3), Camulodunum, Colchester (Wacher 1975: 104; Dunnett 1975: 20-6) – stood on part of, or

immediately adjacent to, the straggling sites of such oppida, in other cases a Roman town on

a new site seems to have taken over the function, and perhaps the name, of an earlier

settlement some distance away; Corinium, Cirencester, for example, seems to replace the

oppidum at Bagendon, 3 miles (4.8 km) to the north (Wacher 1975: 30-2). Kent has recently

(1978) reviewed the evidence of the distribution of finds of late iron-age coins in the London

area, noting the concentration of certain types to the west of the site of the Roman city. He

suggested that these might be attributed to the tribe of the Trinovantes, and might represent a

tribal centre located in that area, pointing out, however, that the dating of the coins implies

that it came to an end (perhaps destroyed in inter-tribal warfare) even before Caesar’s

invasion – the potential rather than actual ancestor of Roman London. Others have noted the

widespread chance finds of iron- age metalwork from the same area, and in particular from

the Thames west of London, compared with the almost total absence of such finds in the

central London area.1

This evidence can hardly be conclusive, given the lack of a site or structures that can be

identified as such a pre-Roman centre – it would presumably lie under the built-up area of

modern west London. To any historian willing to speculate further, it is tempting to look at

what is at first sight the well-established legend or tradition of an earlier city enshrined in the

works of Geoffrey of Monmouth and his successors, to ask whether that story may contain

some historical truth, a memory surviving in oral tradition from the pre-Roman period.

Writers earlier in this century such as Sir Laurence Gomme (1912: 46-7) and W. R. Lethaby

(1902: 13) were prepared to accept that genuine traditions of London’s early history might be

behind some of Geoffrey’s words, while Lewis Spence’s Legendary London (1937:

especially 154-75) was devoted largely to that thesis.

Tatlock, in his comprehensive survey of Geoffrey’s work and its sources (1950: 263, note

24), gave a stern warning against this attitude: “For all his long notoriety as an inventor,

3

scholars have been prone to believe that at this or that special point he may embalm

tradition.” Although others have shown good evidence that Geoffrey’s sources did indeed

include oral tradition, particularly Welsh legend (Loomis 1959; Parry and Caldwell 1959: 81-

5), it is evident that to attribute any statement in the Historia to the survival of an otherwise

unrecorded yet authentic tradition is dangerous. As an example of the application to an

archaeological subject of this approach we may take Piggott’s suggestion (1941) that

Geoffrey’s account of the erection of Stonehenge, involving the bringing of the stones from

Ireland, might embody a genuine folk- memory of the transporting of some of the stones, the

‘bluestones’, from their distant source in Pembrokeshire. This inviting hypothesis has been

restated by other archaeologists, notably Atkinson (1956: 184- 5) and Grinsell (1975:5-11),

but it remains unconvincing. There is little reason to envisage an oral tradition surviving for

approaching three millennia and in spite of changes of population when Geoffrey’s story can

be explained as a deliberate, and imaginative, response to the questions implicit in Henry of

Huntingdon’s description of Stonehenge in his Historia Anglorum a few years before: “Nor

can anyone guess by what means so many stones were raised so high, or why they were built

there” (Atkinson 1956:183; Tatlock 1950: 41). Geoffrey was prepared to guess, and to

embody his guess in ‘history’. When all known written works, all independently recorded

traditions, have been eliminated as sources for Geoffrey’s stories, before re- course is had to

unknown works or un- recorded traditions note must be taken of his inventive genius and his

obvious gift for the reconstruction of history on the scantiest of foundations provided by

earlier writers or by his own knowledge of the contemporary world, or possibly inspired in

some instances by archaeological observations.2

So, before the story of Trinovantum can be used as evidence in the discussion of pre-

Roman London, its status, as history, legend or fiction, requires clarification. Its origin, in

general terms, has long been recognized. John Stow commented on it in the sixteenth century

(Kingsford 1908: 3-4) and Bishop Stillingfleet in the seventeenth (1704: 472- 81); more

recently Lethaby (1902: 12-13), Faral (1929a: 90 and 1929b: 91) and Tatlock (1950: 30)

have dealt briefly with the topic. None of these authors devoted much attention to it, or

attempted to trace the specific steps by which the ‘tradition’ developed. Yet of all Geoffrey’s

stories it is one whose complex genesis in the ambiguous Latin of two Roman authors and

the patriotic fabrications of seventh to ninth-century Britons can be demonstrated with some

certainty, and whose development sheds interesting light on the methods and the attitudes of

early historians.

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Trinovantum

The Trinovantes as a people of pre-Roman and Roman Britain are recorded both historically,

in the writings of Roman authors, and archaeologically (Dunnett 1975); their ‘city’, however,

appeared first, unheralded and unintended, in Julius Caesar’s account of his Gallic campaigns

(De bello gallico 5.20). According to Caesar, during his second invasion of Britain in 54 BC

and after his crossing of the Thames, a tribe called the Trinovantes (or Trinobantes – both

forms are found) came to terms with him, to be followed by others, the Cenimagni, the

Segontiaci, the Ancalites, the Bibroci and the Cassi. He described the Trinovantes as prope

firmissima earum regionum civitas – “about the strongest civitas of that region.” Civitas,

‘state’ or ‘nation’, is Caesar’s general term for the Gallic tribes, and in the context of his own

writings it is unambiguous. Later, however, it was to have a different meaning; sometimes in

later classical Latin and regularly in medieval Latin it was synonymous with urbs, ‘city’, and

readers were to interpret Caesar’s use of the word in that sense.3

Thus, when in the fifth century AD the historian Orosius summarized Caesar’s account of

his invasions of Britain, he employed Caesar’s expression firmissima civitas of the

Trinovantes, but clearly assumed that civitas meant ‘city’, for he immediately went on to

describe the other peoples who surrendered to Caesar as urbes aliae complures – “several

other cities” (Historiae 6. 9-10). Thus, by equating civitas and urbs, and in ignorance of the

actual situation in the south of Britain some five hundred years before his own time, Orosius

attributed to the early Britons a number of city-states, of which that of the Trinovantes was

‘the strongest’.

Morever, the ambiguity is compounded, for Orosius referred to the Trinovantes not in the

nominative, but in the genitive: “the strongest civitas (that) of the Trinovantes” –

Trinovantum firmissima civitas. The unwary reader will take Trinovantum as a neuter

singular noun in apposition to civitas – “the strongest civitas, (called) Trinovantum” – the

regular Latin idiom seen, for example, in the familiar Urbs Roma – “the City (of) Rome”.

The works of Orosius were to be of great importance as a major, in some cases the sole,

source of information on Roman history used by medieval historians. Thus his chapters on

Caesar’s British campaigns were the immediate source of the account by Bede, the first

English historian to describe these events. Bede did little more than transcribe Orosius’

narrative, merely omitting a few words and adding a description of the stakes with which the

Britons fortified the Thames ford, stakes which, he claimed, could still be seen – an early, if

mistaken, application of archaeological evidence by a historian (Historia ecclesiastica 1.2;

Colgrave and Mynors 1969: 20-3). Since Bede made no comment on the Trinovantum

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firmissima civitas it is impossible to be certain in what sense he understood the phrase.

Although translators have tended to compromise, with versions such as “the strongest city of

the Trinovantes” (Sherley-Price 1955: 41), in the face of the ambiguity of Bede’s only source

it seems probable that he would have preferred the more obvious meaning, and that the

correct translation should be “the strongest city, Trinovantum”.

While Bede was presenting Caesar’s wars in Britain to English readers, a separate and

distinctive account of the same events was developing among the Britons, in the Historia

Britonum.4 It is not intended to discuss here the authorship or development of this work,

which in its final form is attributed to south Wales, to Nennius and to the early ninth century,

though it clearly incorporated much earlier material. For this account of Caesar’s invasions,

the writer, like Bede, drew on Orosius, but produced a lively if unreliable précis of Orosius’

narrative very different from Bede’s transcript (Historia Britonum 19, 20). The divergence

from Caesar’s own account is so great that at first sight it is easy to believe that the author

had access to an independent version of the events, presumably in native British tradition – a

view adopted by Marsh (1970: 73). Yet the differences can be explained by the author’s

misunderstanding and faulty memory of a text probably already corrupt, and his enthusiastic

embroidery on it (Faral 1929a: 86-92).

From the outset the tone is different. Caesar, while reporting his losses, stressed his

victories and the surrenders of British tribes, and Orosius in his bald summary gave no undue

emphasis to either side. The British version, on the other hand, is not unexpectedly more

favourable to the Britons, ignoring the Romans’ victories and recording only their defeats

and disastrous losses of ships and men. The surrender of Trinovantum civitas becomes a

battle (perhaps on the partisan assumption that no British city would surrender without a

battle – indeed the surrender is not recorded): “Battle was waged for the third time near the

place which is called Trinovantum.” Thus, Trinovantum was now a definite if unlocalized

place. Yet its location is perhaps implicit in the text. Immediately before the account of the

events at Trinovantum the author had described Caesar’s battle to cross the Thames; in this

he followed Orosius. From either Nennius or Orosius the reader is likely to draw the

conclusion that the territory of Trinovantum/the Trinovantes lay beyond (that is, north of) the

Thames, and close to its crossing-point – a fact which, even if implied, is certainly not

explicit in Caesar’s own account, though the geographical writings of Ptolemy and other

evidence confirm the location of the tribe in this general area (Dunnett 1975: 1; 11-13; 27-9).

Yet one historian is more specific in locating the events of 54 BC. About the end of the

ninth century, an English version of Orosius’ history was produced, perhaps inspired by King

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Alfred, to which were added, among other things, descriptions of the geography of those

northern regions of which Orosius had no knowledge. The account of Caesar’s invasions is

very brief, but presents some interesting features (5.7.2; Bosworth 1859: 110). It omits

Caesar’s earlier raid, in 55 BC, and abbreviates to a bare mention the first two battles of the

54 BC campaign, both of which are placed in ‘Kentland’. The third battle, according to

Orosius, was at the Thames ford; Bede had described the stakes still to be seen there; the

English translator boldly identified the ford as Wallingford. After the Thames battle, Orosius

recorded the surrender of Trinovantum civitas, with its leader ‘Androgorius’ (‘Androgius’ in

Bede), followed by the surrender of urbes aliae complures; the English version is that “after

the battle, the king came into his hands, and the townspeople (burhware) that were in

Cirencester, and afterwards all that were in the island.” Clearly “the townspeople that were in

Cirencester” translates Trinovantum civitas. Not only is the existence of a city accepted, but

it is identified with a contemporary town. There is little to recommend this identification,

presumably based on the assonance of Trin(ovantum) and Cyrn-(ceastre) and the recognition

of the latter as an ancient town, though it was perhaps attractive to Alfred’s court in that, with

the battle at Wallingford, it placed Caesar’s victories firmly on the borders of Wessex! This

is an identification that does not seem to be taken up by later writers, who turned to the Latin

of Orosius rather than the English account.

Apart from this abortive attempt to localize Trinovantum more closely, the histories

readily available in the ninth century seem merely to have agreed that there was such a place

in the time of Caesar, that it was the strongest city of the Britons, and that it lay just north of

the Thames and close to a crossing-point. Three hundred or so years added no more, until

Geoffrey of Monmouth came to apply his mind to the subject; if anyone before him made the

attractive assumption that the city so situated was London he does not seem to have

committed the idea to writing.

The Trojan colonists

It is the Historia Britonum which provides the earliest account (indeed a choice of accounts)

of the Trojan ancestry of the British, a story modelled on that of the descent of the Romans

from Aeneas’ band of Trojan exiles, and one of a group of such stories found among the

nations of north-west Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The historians of these successor-states were faced with the problems of tracing the early

histories of new nations of whose ancestors classical authors had little, and nothing good, to

say and whose own unwritten traditions were confused, unreliable and often, like the

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genealogies of Anglo-Saxon kings from the god Woden (Historia Britonum 57; 59-61),

tainted with a paganism unacceptable to a Christian writer.

However, there were precedents in native tradition, in the Bible and in classical writers

for the eponymous hero, the founder who gave a race its origin and name, while the Bible

also provided an unambiguous frame- work for the writing of world history, for it stated that

there had been a universal Flood, after which the descendants of the three sons of Noah had

repopulated the whole earth (Genesis 9:19). Thus, it is not surprising to find in an early

chapter of the Historia Britonum (19) an account of four brothers, Francus, Romanus,

Almannus and Brito (or Britto), who traced their ancestry to Japheth, son of Noah, but whose

actual eponymic origin is obvious, and whose inspiration can be found in stories current

earlier among the Franks (Faral 1929a: 81-6).

However, for any nation with a claim to succeed to the power of Rome the temptation

remained to legitimize that claim by a genealogy proving a close kinship with the Romans.

The Romans’ own ancestry had been described most vividly by Vergil in the Aeneid – the

wanderings of the founding-father Aeneas after the fall of Troy, and his settlement in Italy;

yet that ancestry itself was no more than a patriotic fabrication of the third century BC by

Roman writers who, after the wars with Greece, sought in Greek legend a national hero who

was himself an enemy of Greece, and found one in Homer’s pious Trojan (Cary 1949: 11-

12). The Frankish authors of the seventh and eighth centuries who created a Trojan ancestry

for the Franks (Faral 1929a: 172-4; 263-93) were thus in good company and were doing no

more, though they did not realize it, than their Roman predecessors of a thousand years

earlier.

In the various recensions of the Historia Britonum are incorporated a number of attempts

(the compiler of the vulgate text (Harleian text 10) refers to them as a “two- fold experiment”

– hoc experimentum bifarie inveni – thus admitting their speculative nature) to relate the

Britons to the Trojan ancestry of the Romans, in emulation of the Frankish accounts. The

first of these, found in full only in the early ‘Chartres’ manuscript, traces the descent of the

Britons back to one Brutus, a Roman ‘consul’ descended from Aeneas and identified as the

brother of Romulus and Remus (Chartres text 11). The other, the vulgate version, tells of

Britto, grandson of Aeneas, who after accidentally killing his father fled from Italy to Britain

(Harleian text 10). An attempt was also made, not very successfully, to reconcile the Trojan

descent of Brutus/Britto (the names seem interchangeable) and the biblical genealogy from

Japheth (18). These stories are no more than the historical speculations of ‘Nennius’ and his

sources, and in no way relevant to a discussion of any authentic native tradition of the origins

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of the British (Faral 1929a: 170-84;, 192-8; for a contrary view see Spence 1937: especially

165-6). There is no trace of any such tradition. Bede, admittedly perhaps not well-placed, as

an Englishman, for the study of British traditions, was able to record only the belief that the

Britons had come from Brittany – perhaps merely a recognition of the obvious kinship of

races on both sides of the Channel.5

The common Trojan ancestry of Romans, Franks and Britons was to become a historical

commonplace, imitated by writers of other nations, as by Snorri Sturluson in the euhemeristic

prologue to his Edda, deriving the Norse gods from Troy (Young 1971: 25-8). Yet the

originators of these stories recognized that they were no more than speculations, and such

must remain the extent of their historical validity.

New Troy

The Historia Britonum provided only a skeletal outline of the Trojan origins of the Britons,

and an unrelated reference to a place called Trinovantum in the time of Julius Caesar; of the

history of the Britons between these two periods it had nothing to report. The lack of a

reliable British history was, by the twelfth century, notorious (Tatlock 1950: 430-1). In 1139

the English historian Henry of Huntingdon wrote to a correspondent, Warinus the Breton, in

a letter quoted in Robert de Torigny’s Chronica, that he had begun his Historia Anglorum

from the time of Julius Caesar, omitting the period between Brutus and Caesar, because in

spite of assiduous research he had failed to find any evidence, either oral or written, relating

to the pre-Roman British kings: ... nec voce nec scripto horum temporum saepissime notitiam

quaerens inveniri potui (Chambers 1927: 251-2) . Yet, he continued in the same letter, he

had recently discovered with astonishment (stupens inveni) a written work on the subject.

The work was the recently completed Historia regum Britanniae and its author, who claimed

to have found in “a certain very ancient book in the British language” the evidence for the

early history of Britain that others had sought in vain, was Geoffrey of Monmouth.6 Born, or

brought up, in Monmouth, perhaps of Breton stock, Geoffrey was a long-term resident of

Oxford and probable sometime visitor to London (Tatlock 1950: 438-48). Discussion of his

sources has been long and occasionally acrimonious. We must regretfully class the . “ancient

book in the British language” along with Professor James Moriarty’s Dynamics of an

asteroid and the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred among great fictional

books; Geoffrey’s written sources were, it seems, ones equally available to us. Whatever his

sources, however, Geoffrey’s aim is clear: to provide, if with tongue in cheek, the history of

the early inhabitants of the British Isles which, as Henry of Huntingdon noted, was lacking,

9

and in particular to fill convincingly the void between the coming of Brutus and the invasion

of Caesar.

To the bare outline of Brutus’ settlement, derived from the Historia Britonum, he added

much picturesque detail, providing Brutus with fresh adventures, a prophecy of success, and

Trojan companions to settle his new- found land (Historia regum Britanniae 1.3-18). Many

of the events and characters are clearly modelled on those of the Aeneid, and indeed in style

and spirit Geoffrey’s work has more in common with Vergil’s than with that of historians

who were his contemporaries. He was producing for the Britons a foundation epic

comparable with the Aeneid, with as little basis in historical fact.

For the kings, from Brutus to the coming of the Romans, he unscrupulously robbed and

adapted later Welsh genealogies and traditional tales; presumably believing that history

repeats itself, he was not above reading back into the prehistoric past events, characters and

certainly attitudes of more recent, even contemporary times – a failing not unknown among

more recent historians; Gransden has commented (1974: 206) on his value “as a mirror of his

own time, not as a record of the past”. His genius, however, is clearly seen in the two-way

link he forged between the Trojans, the events of Caesar’s time, and the modern period, a

link consisting in the place, and the name, Trinovantum. Trinovantum he identified in one

direction as ‘New Troy’, a city founded by the Trojans, in the other as London, the most

important English city of his own time (1.17, 3.20). According to Geoffrey, Brutus, having

divided the land (now called ‘Britain’ after his own name) among the Trojan colonists, set

out to found a city. Discovering a suitable site on the banks of the Thames, Brutus built his

city, and called it, in memory of lost Troy, ‘New Troy’ – Troia Nova (Fig. 2).

The derivation of Trinovantum from Troia Nova is a delightful piece of etymologizing,

an activity in which Geoffrey excelled, and his explanation of the changes to the name in the

course of time is as convincing as it is spurious. The name and status of Trinovantum came,

as we have seen, from the Historia Britonum and Bede/Orosius, but that its etymology was

Geoffrey’s own contribution is suggested by the fact that it is he who first provided, with his

British kings, the necessary bridge from the Trojans to Caesar; without that, no-one would

have the motive to connect in this way two completely unrelated incidents in the historical

record – the Trojan settlement and the surrender of Trinovantum.

To suggest that settlers in a new land would found a city is of course, no novelty, nor

indeed is the idea of a new or second Tray. The oracle of Apollo prophesied to Aeneas,

according to Vergil, that he would found another Troy (Aeneid 3, 11.80-98) and this is

reflected in Geoffrey’s narrative in a similar prophecy made to Brutus by Apollo’s sister

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Diana (1.11) (Fig. 3). Though both oracles clearly refer on the surface to a new Trojan nation

rather than a city, the extension of their meaning is reasonable. Actual ‘Troys’ were not

unknown in the medieval world, and Geoffrey may have been aware of Troia in Apulia,

referred to by the chronicler Ekkehard, when it was captured by the emperor Henry II in

1022, as ‘new Troy’ (Faral 1929a: 266). Much closer to home was a little settlement not a

mile from Geoffrey’s own town of Monmouth, named from the River Trothy, and certainly

known as Troy before the late twelfth century (Kissack 1974: 22). The inspiration for

Geoffrey’s ‘New Troy’ must come, as with so many of his inventions, from a multiplicity of

sources.

Having described the foundation of Trinovantum which Brutus granted to its citizens

together with a law-code (a fantasy that was to play a part in medieval discussion of

London’s legal status), Geoffrey turned to the awkward fact that its name must at some point

have been changed to ‘London’. We find two slightly different accounts of this change,

attributed to King Lud, who rebuilt and fortified the city. Either Lud himself changed its

name to Kaerlud (‘the City of Lud’) (1.17), or it was changed in his honour (3.20). The

chronology is inconsistent; Lud died before Caesar’s invasion, yet the city appears as

Trinovantum in Geoffrey’s account of that invasion (4.3-4; 4.8-9) – as, of course, his sources

required. The change of name, and its further development by way of Kaerludein to Lundene

and Lundres, is not one of Geoffrey’s more elegant inventions; it merely provides the desired

link between the ‘strongest city’ of British times and that of Geoffrey’s day.

It was not only the city, according to Geoffrey, which took its name from Lud, but also

one of its gates, where he was buried – Ludgate, admittedly a name simpler to derive from

‘Lud’ than is London, with its intrusive ‘n’! Eponymous founders abound in Geoffrey’s

Historia, and although Lud himself may have an origin in Celtic tradition,7 there is no need

to look beyond a similarity of name to account for his status as founder or rebuilder of

London and its west gate. It is tempting, in spite of Tatlock’s warning referred to above, to

suggest that here for once Geoffrey may indeed “embalm tradition”, in the form of a locally-

known story of the origin of London. If any local tradition of London’s foundation did exist-

and there is no evidence before Geoffrey’s time that it did – it seems far more likely that it

would revolve around the simple isolated figure of the eponymous Lud than the complexities

of a Trojan founder and a change of name. Geoffrey’s story of London’s refoundation and

rebuilding would then derive from an earlier account of the city’s original foundation. At a

number of points in his Historia, Geoffrey reveals an apparent knowledge of London’s

topography; his references to the city wall and (perhaps) its ditch and to the Tower of

11

London may simply reflect common knowledge, but he seems to show particular

acquaintance with Ludgate and its associated church of St Martin, Billingsgate and its

wharves, and the Walbrook stream (Tatlock 1950: 30-4). Whether that knowledge was

acquired on a personal visit or through an informant, he could as easily have learnt in the

same way local stories of the city’s origin. Yet the story of Lud need be nothing more than

historical speculation by Geoffrey or another – an eponymic invention with as little

inspiration from popular legend, and as little validity, as the story of Romulus and Remus

(Cary 1949: 780) or sixteenth- century Russian tales of Mosokh (son of Japheth) and his wife

Kva, the founders of Moscow (Voyce 1972: 5).

The city of Trinovantum/London plays a major role in the events, largely the products of

Geoffrey’s imagination, that fill the pages of the Historia. More important than any possible

influence of local tradition is London’s contemporary strength, its priority over other towns

of twelfth-century England and its special relationship with the king. It was this that was to

confirm Geoffrey’s story as a ‘tradition’ and to sustain it almost unquestioned until the end of

the sixteenth century.

The tradition

The Historia regum Britanniae won immediate wide popularity and circulation, as witness

the forty-eight complete manuscripts of it surviving from the twelfth century alone which

Acton Griscom was able to list (1929: 573-7), while its adaptation into French verse by Wace

and back into English by Layamon gave it currency far beyond the circle of clerics and

scholars who could read it in Latin. Accepted as historical fact, it was an authoritative text on

which historians could draw confidently and upon which they built boldly.

Forty years after Geoffrey wrote the Historia it was widely enough known and accepted

to serve William Fitz Stephen, the biographer of Thomas Becket, as the basis – without the

need for detailed explanation – for a (favourable) comparison of London with Rome, that

other Trojan colony (Kingsford 1908b: 224-5; Stenton 1934:29-30). In the following century

Matthew Paris marked on a version of his map of the route to Rome: “the city of London

which is the capital of England. Brutus who first settled England founded it and called it New

Troy” (Fig. 4) (Vaughan 1958: 242 and 247-9, pl. 12; illustrated in colour, Glanville 1972:

73). To the poets of the middle ages – Richard of Maidstone, John Gower (Robertson 1968:

3) and the anonymous writer of St Erkenwald (Morse 1975 :55) in the fourteenth century,

John Lydgate in the fifteenth and (probably) William Dunbar at the beginning of the

sixteenth (Kingsford 1905: 115 and 253) – London was “New Troie;/The metropol & the

12

mayster toun”, “Citee off Citees ... / In thy bygynnynge called new Troye”, or “Strong Troy

in vigour and in strenuytie”. London’s high ancestry matched its contemporary glory.

More significant perhaps is William Fitz Stephen’s comparison of the legal systems of

London and Rome (both being derived from the laws of Troy!) (Kingsford 1908b: 224-5;

Stenton 1934: 29-30), for elsewhere we find the ‘fact’ of London’s Trojan foundation used as

a legal precedent. Geoffrey’s Trinovantum might reflect the aspirations of medieval

Londoners, but it could also serve to bolster those same aspirations. When John Carpenter,

London’s Common Clerk, compiled his book of city laws and customs, the Liber albus, in

1419, he was able to cite the so-called Laws of Edward the Confessor, a twelfth-century

confection (Liebermann 1903: 657), as the statutory basis for the weekly meetings of the

Hustings Court, a requirement attributed to the laws of ‘Great Troy’ said to be still observed

in London (Liber albus 3.4; Riley 1859: 497-8 and 1861: 427). He also ascribed London’s

immemorial control over the Thames to the care with which Brutus had selected the city’s

site on its banks. That such historical traditions could in all seriousness be applied to resolve

legal problems is illustrated, for example, by the manner in which, in 1417, the mayor and

aldermen of London turned to the ‘tradition’ (inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth) of the

early foundation of a cathedral on the site of St Peter’s Cornhill to settle a dispute over

precedence in the annual Whit Monday procession (Riley 1868: 651-3), while in the twelfth

century Bishop Gilbert Foliot had cited Geoffrey in his campaign to ‘restore’ the

archbishopric to London from Canterbury (Morey and Brooke 1965: 156-8).

The fate of the ‘British history’ in the later middle ages and after has been described by

Kendrick (1950). At the end of the sixteenth century John Stow, though with some hesitation,

incorporated a summary of Geoffrey’s history – with later embellishments, such as the date

of 1108 BC for the Trojans’ arrival – in his Annales, introducing it as “the received British

history” and “the common received opinion” (1592: 10-11). His contemporary, William

Camden, expressed similar views in his Britannia, that to attempt to refute the story of

Brutus would be “to strive with the stream and current of Time; and to struggle against an

opinion commonly and long since received” (Holland 1610: 6). To such historians, though

they expressed reservations, the history of the British kings was a tradition, with all the

authority that long belief and frequent repetition could lend it.

That authority, and with it belief in London’s Trojan origin, was further under- mined in

the seventeenth century, though Brinkley (1967) has shown how the validity of the British

history could be a matter for political debate, its reputation reflecting the varying fortunes of

king and parliament, and has provided a survey of the attitudes of historical and political

13

writers of the period – by no means all on one side (1967: 55-62 and 206-12). Whatever the

views of historians, the story of London’s foundation survived in popular tradition. One of A

hundred notabe things for a penny (the misprint is original), a chap book published in 1680

(Thompson 1976: 189), was that “London was built 356 years before Rome in the time of Eli

the High Priest” – the wording is after Richard Grafton’s Chronicle of 1569 (1809: 28); and

in 1679 a playwright could address his audience as “London Trojans” (Brinkley 1967: 118).

Little remains of New Troy today. The Trojan Corineus and the aboriginal giant

Goemagog (Gogmagog), whose epic struggle Geoffrey of Monmouth described (Historia

regum Britanniae 1.16), stood in effigy to greet royal visitors to the city in 1554 and 1558

(Fairholt 1859: 28-9) and still, in different guise, watch over the deliberations of the City’s

Common Council in Guildhall. Yet for some five or six centuries after Geoffrey first

described the founding of Trinovantum the story was, in its persistence, in its ability to

withstand logical attacks, truly a ‘legend’ as defined by the Shorter Oxford English

Dictionary: “An unauthentic story handed down by tradition and popularly regarded as

historical”.

Some legends may incorporate a germ of truth, a ‘folk-memory’ of actual events.

‘Trinovantum’ is not such a legend. In origin it was artificial, a strange melange of

unscholarly errors and scholarly inventions. I t is irrelevant to any discussion of the existence

or non-existence of a pre-Roman London. It reflects not the origins of London but London’s

need for a pedigree, and perhaps the lack, in the twelfth century, of any earlier tradition on

the subject strong enough to compete with Geoffrey’s speculation. In its development it

illuminates the methods of the historians who dealt with it: their respect for, but misuse of,

authorities; their tendency to rewrite history to suit contemporary needs or prejudices, to

provide the Britons with a history of past greatness as compensation for their later weakness,

or London with a glorious genesis as the rationale for its later strength. Similar attitudes to

the past still survive, and it would be sanguine to expect modern historians to be totally

immune from their influence; perhaps Geoffrey of Monmouth merely lacked the subtlety

expected of a historical writer today.

Notes

1 This concentration is noted by Kent (1978: 56), and was discussed by Dr Mansel

Spratling in an (unpublished) lecture to the London and Middlesex Archaeological

Society in October 1977 under the provocative title “Was London really a Roman

foundation? The Celtic oppidum of Londonion”.

14

2 Geoffrey’s purpose and methods have been discussed recently by Brooke (1976) and

Gransden (1974: 201-8). Tatlock (1950) and Parry and Caldwell (1959) provide a

thorough conspectus of his sources. Little attention has been paid to instances in which

Geoffrey’s inspiration seems to be archaeological: the high status assigned to the

Roman town of Caerleon, represented in Geoffrey’s day by impressive ruins (Tatlock

1950: 69-70); the story of the beheading of a Roman legion beside the Walbrook

stream in London, ‘confirmed’ by more recent discoveries of skulls (Merrifield 1965:

76 note 16); the ‘bronze horseman’ in which the body of Cadwallo was entombed,

perhaps reflecting a Roman equestrian statue surmounting a monumental arch (Clark

1978; Clark 1980).

3 The Oxford Latin Dictionary (Lewis and Short 1879 :346-7) defines the meaning of

‘city’ as “rare and mostly post-Augustan”; Latham (1965 :89) confirms the common

medieval meaning of ‘(cathedral ) city’.

4 Or Historia Brittonum. Edited by Faral (1929c: 1-62) and Lot (1934). Both give the

text of the variant Chartres manuscript (MS.98) separately. Translated by Wade-Evans

(1937). The recent edition by Morris (1980) combines a text which is basically that of

Faral (from Harleian MS.3859) with a new translation.

5 Historia ecclesiastica 1.1. Bede was apparently unaware of the migrations in the

opposite direction from Britain to Brittany in the fifth and sixth centuries AD which

could explain these links; his source, Gildas, did not specify the “lands beyond the sea”

to which the Britons fled from the Saxon invaders (Winterbottom 1978 :90, 98).

6 Edited by Faral (l929c: 63-303) and Griscom (1929); the most accessible translation is

that of Thorpe (1966). References in the text are to the traditional division into books

and chapters followed by Griscom and Thorpe, rather than that of Faral.

7 Tatlock 1950: 30-1. See Ross (1967:176-9) for the identification Lludd = Nudd =

Nodons. The story of Lludd and Llefelys, familiar from the Mabinogion (Jones and

Jones 1974: 89-94) is found interpolated and attributed to Geoffrey’s King Lud in the

Welsh version of the Historia, published in translation by Griscom (1929 :301-5).

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