Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/870

 LONDON [HISTORY. Statues. 145 feet in height, crowned with a statue of Nelson by Barry, and having at its base four colossal bronze lions modelled by Sir Edwin Landseer ; the Duke of York Column, Carlton House Terrace (1833), an Ionic pillar 124 feet, designed by Wyatt, sur mounted by a bronze statue by Westmacott ; Westminster Column, erected to the memory of the old pupils of Westminster school who died in the Russian and Indian wars of 1854-59 ; the Guards Memorial, Waterloo Place, erected in honour of the foot guards who died in the Crimea ; the Albert Memorial, Hyde Park, a highly decorated Gothic structure adorned with numerous rilievos and statues, erected from the designs of Sir Gilbert Scott at a cost of 120,000 ; Cleopatra s Needle, presented to the Government by Mehemet Ali in 1819, brought from Alexandria in 1878, and erected on the Thames embankment on a pedestal of grey granite. Temple Bar, erected by Sir Christopher Wren (1670-72), was re moved in 1877, but its site is at present occupied by an erection surmounted by a griffin. The following is a list of the principal public statues : Name. Site. Sculptor. Achilles. Hyde Park. Westmacott. Anne, Queen. St Paul s Churchyard. Bird. Beaconsfield, Earl of. Parliament Square. Raggi. Bedford, John, Duke of. Russell Square. Westmacott. Bentinck, Lord George. Cavendish Square. Campbell. Burgoyne. Waterloo Place. Boehm. Canning, George. New Palace Yard. Westmacott. Charles I. Charing Cross. Le Soeur. Charles IT. Chelsea Hospital. Gibbons. Clyde, Lord. Waterloo Place. Marochetti. Cobden. Hampstead Road. Wills. Cumberland. Duke of. Cavendish Square. Chew. Derby, Earl of. Parliament Square. Noble. Fox, Charles James. Bloomsbury Square Westmacott. Franklin, Sir John. Waterloo Place. Noble. George III. Somerset House. Bacon. Do. Cockspur Street. M. C. Wyatt. George IV. Trafalgar Square. Chantrey. Havelock. Trafalgar Square. Behnes. Herbert, Lord. Pall Mall. Foley. Hill, Rowland. Royal Exchange. 0. Ford. James II. Whitehall. Gibbons. Jenner. Kensington Gardens. Marshall. Kent, Duke of. Portland Place. Gahagan. Mill, J. S. Victoria Embankment. Woolner. Napier, Sir Charles. Trafalgar Square. Adams. Outram, Sir J. Victoria Embankment. Noble. Palmerston, Lord. Palace Yard. Woolner. Peabody, George. Royal Exchange. Story. Peel, Sir Robert. Cheapside. Behnes. Pitt, William. Hanover Square. Chantrey. Prince Consort. Holborn Viaduct. Bacon. Richard I. Old Palace Yard. Marochetti. Sloane, Sir H. Chelsea. Rysbraek. Victoria. Royal Exchange. Lough. Wellincton, Duke of. Green Park Arch. Wyatt. Do. Tower Green. Milnes. Do. Royal Exchange. Chantrey. William III. St James s Square. Bacon. William IV. King William Street. Nixon. HISTORY. (T. F. H.) BRITISH AXD ROMAN (TO 449 A.D.). Bishop Stillingfleet, writ ing of London, stated that after the fullest inquiry he was in clined &quot;to believe it of a Roman foundation, and no older than the time of Claudius&quot; (Oriyincs Brit., 1685, p. 43); and several antiquaries and historians hold the same opinion. 1 Although Geoffrey of Monmouth s vision of a great British city of Troynovant, founded by Brut, a descendant of ^Eneas, must be relegated to the limbo of myths, we need not necessarily dispute the existence of a British London. There can be little doubt that the name of London has a Celtic origin, and therefore there is probably a grain of truth in Geoffrey s fanciful description. The place was probably very small, but it must have been chosen for its com manding position on the banks of a fine river, and there may be some truth in the assertion that one Belinus formed a port or haven on the site of the present Billingsgate, although it does not follow that &quot;he also made a gate of wonderful structure,&quot; or &quot;over it built a prodigiously large tower &quot; (Historia, lib. iii. cap. x.). What a British town was like we learn from Julius Csesar, who tells us that it &quot;was nothing more than a thick wood, fortified with a ditch and rampart, to serve as a place of retreat against the incursions of their enemies&quot; (Dc Bella Galileo, v. 21). We may therefore imagine a clearing out of the great forest of Middlesex, extending probably from the site of St Paul s Cathedral to that of the Bank of England, with the dwellings of the Britons spread about the higher ground looking down upon the Thames. The late Mr Thomas Lewin believed that London had attained its prosperity before the Dr Guest affirmed that the notion of a British town having &quot;preceded the Roman ca-np has no foundation to rest upon, and is inconsistent with all we know of the early geography of this part of Britain &quot; (Arclixological Journal, vol. xxiii. p. 180) ; and Mr J. R. Green in his lately published work, The Making of England, expresses the same opinion (p. 101). This was not, however, Mr Kemble s belief, for he held that it was difficult to believe that Cair Lunden was an unimportant .place even in Caesar s day (Saxons in England, vol. ii. p. 2G6). Romans came, and held that it was probably the capital of Cassi- vellaunus, which was taken and sacked by Julius Caesar. Not satisfied with affirming the existence of a British London, he went further, and indicated its extent. On the hill situated between the river Flete on the west and the Wallbrook on the east was seated the British town. The western gate was Ludgate and the eastern Dowgate, and much of Mr Lewin s argument rests upon the fact that these two names are of British origin (Arch&ologia, vol. xl. p. 59). The origin of London will probably always remain a sub ject of dispute, for want of decisive facts. A negative fact is that few if any remains of an earlier date than the Roman occupation have been discovered ; 2 but, on the other hand, London could scarcely have come to be the important commercial centre described by Tacitus if it had only been founded a few years previously, and after the conquest of Claudius. Now there can be no doubt that the Britons made considerable progress during the period between Julius and Claudius, and it seems upon the whole highly probable that London as a British settlement may have come into existence then. There is some reason to believe that there were two settlements, one on the north and the other on the south bank of the Thames. If so they would be within the territories of distinct and possibly hostile tribes. There might be a ferry, and even, as we shall mention presently, a bridge of some description towards the close of the period, but this point will come before us again. The Roman occupation of Britain extended over a period equal to that which has elapsed since Henry VIII. s reign. During these centuries (43-409 A.D.) there was ample time for cities to grow up from small beginnings, to overflow their borders, and to be more than once rebuilt. The earliest Roman London must have been a comparatively small place, but it probably contained a military fort intended to cover the passage of the river. The mouth of the Thames was then only a few miles off, large portions of what are now the counties of Kent and Essex being marshes overflowed with water. The original investigations of Sir Christopher Wren led him to take this view, and he expressed the opinion that &quot;the whole country between Camberwell Hill and the hills of Essex might have been a great frith or sinus of the sea, and much wider near the mouth of the Thames, which made a large plain of sand at low water, through which the river found its way. This mighty broad sand (now good meadow) was restrained by large banks still remaining, and reducing the river into its channel ; a great work, of which no history gives .account ; the Britons were too rude to attempt it, the Saxons too much busied with continual wars ; he concluded therefore it was Roman work &quot; (Wren s Parcntalia, p. 285). The opinion that these embankments are Roman work is the one generally held, but so greatly does opinion vary on all these points that some have supposed that they were not built until the reign of Henry VI. 3 Neither Strabo nor the elder Pliny alludes to London, although they wrote on Britain, and the name does not occur in literature until used by Tacitus. That author distinctly says that London had not in 61 A.D. been dignified with the name of a colony (Anna!,., xiv. 33). The Roman general Paullinus Suetonius, after marching rapidly from Wales to put down a serious insurrection, found Londinium unfitted for a basis of operations, and therefore left the place to the mercy of Boadicea, who entirely destroyed it and killed the inhabitants in large numbers. When Tacitus wrote, Verulamium and Camulodunum possessed mints, but Londinium was not so distinguished. Subsequently, however, it became a place of mintage. When the British power was finally destroyed London again grew into importance, and we find it holding an important position in the Itinerary of Antoninus, Londinium being cither a starting-point or a terminus in nearly half the routes described in the portion devoted to Britain. Ptolemy mentions Londinium, but places it on the south side of the Thames ; this may merely be a mistake on Ptolemy s part, but it seems more probable that he referred more particularly to Southwark, which, as has been already pointed out, may have had a distinct origin from the Londinium of the north bank of the river. Londinium was plundered in the reign of Diocletian and Maximian by the army of the usurper 2 General Pitt Pavers (then Colonel Lane Fox) discovered in ISfiT certain piles in excavations near London Wall and Southwark Street, possibly the remains of pile buildings, which he made the subject of a paper read before the Anthropo logical Society of London (Journal, vol. v. pp. Ixxi-lxxx). These piles averted 6 to 8 inches square, others of a smaller size were 4 inches by 3 inches, and one or two were as much as a foot square. They were found in the peat just above the virgin gravel, and with them were found the refuse of kitchen middens broken pottery. &amp;lt;fcc., of the Roman period, but there was no superstructure. There is not much here upon which to found a theory, but nevertheless the fact is a valuable item of evidence in a very complicated question. Jf, as seems certain, these piles are remains of pile dwellings, there is every reason to believe that they were sunk by the Britons rather than by the Romans, and General Rivers thinks it probable that they are the remains of the British capital of Cnssivellaunus, situated in the marshes, and of necessity built on piles. 3 Sir George Airy holds that fie embankment of the lower reaches of the Thames could not have been undertaken until after the construction of Old London Bridge, as when that was built the tide must have been small (Proc. Jnft. Civ. Eng., vol. xlix. p. 1^0). It is evident that, when the tidal water covered half a mile on both banks of the Thames for a distance of 30 miles, the river proper must have been considerably shallower than at present. Mr J. B. Redman calculated that the quantity of water shut out by the embankments equalled from five -eighths to three-fourths of the present tidal column (I roc. Insl. Civ. Eng., vol. xlix. p. (J7j.