Trees that are to live long grow slowly. Slow and stately as an oak London grew and grew, till now nearly five million souls represent its leaves. Our London is very old. Centuries before Christ there probably came the first few half-naked fishermen and hunters, who reared, with flint axes and such rude tools, some miserable huts on the rising ground that, forming the north bank of the Thames, slopes to the river some sixty miles from where it joins the sea. According to some, the river spread out like a vast lake between the Surrey and the Essex hills in those times when the first half-savage settlers found the low slopes of the future London places of health and defence amid a vast and dismal region of fen, swamp, and forest. The heroism and the cruelties, the hopes and fears of those poor barbarians, darkness never to be removed has hidden from us for ever. In later days monkish historians, whom Milton afterwards followed, ignored these poor early relations of ours, and invented, as a more fitting ancestor of Englishmen, Brute, a fugitive nephew of Æneas of Troy. But, stroll on where we will, the pertinacious savage, with his limbs stained blue and his flint axe red with blood, is a ghost not easily to be exorcised from the banks of the Thames, and in some Welsh veins his blood no doubt flows at this very day. The founder of London had no historian to record his hopes: a place where big salmon were to be found, and plenty of wild boars were to be met with, was probably his highest ambition. How he bartered with Phœnicians or Gauls for amber or iron no Druid has recorded. How he slew the foraging Belgæ, or was slain by them and dispossessed, no bard has sung. Whether he was generous and heroic as the New Zealander, or apelike and thievish as the Bushman, no ethnologist has yet proved. The very ashes of the founder of London have long since turned to earth, air, and water.
No doubt the few huts that formed early London were fought for over and over again, as wolves wrangle round a carcass. On Cornhill there probably dwelt petty kings who warred with the kings of Ludgate; and in Southwark there lurked or burrowed other chiefs who, perhaps by intrigue or force, struggled for centuries to get a foothold in Thames Street. But to such infusoria History (glorying only in offenders, criminals, and robbers on the largest scale) justly pays no heed. This alone we know, that the early rulers of London before the Christian era passed away like the wild beasts they fought and slew, and their very names have perished. One line of an old blind Greek poet might have immortalised them among the motley nations that crowded into Troy or swarmed under its walls; but, alas for them, that line was never written! No, Founder of London! thy name was written on fluid ooze of the marsh, and the first tide that washed over it from the Nore obliterated it for ever. Yet, perhaps even now thou sleepest as quietly fathoms deep in soft mud, in some still nook of Barking Creek, as if all the world were ringing with thy glory.
But descending quick to the lower but safer and firmer ground of fact, let us cautiously drive our first pile into the shaky morass of early London history.
A learned modern antiquary, Thomas Lewin, has proved, as nearly as any such things can be proved, that Julius Caesar and 8,000 men, who had sailed from Boulogne, landed near Romney Marsh about half-past five o'clock on Sunday the 27th of August, 55 years before the birth of our Saviour. Centuries before that very remarkable August day on which the brave standard-bearer of Caesar's Tenth Legion sprang from his gilt galley into the sea and, eagle in hand, advanced against the javelins of the painted Britons who lined the shore, there is now no doubt London was already existing as a British town of some importance, and known to the fishermen and merchants of the Gauls and Belgians. Strabo, a Greek geographer who flourished in the reign of Augustus, speaks of British merchants as bringing to the Seine and the Rhine shiploads of corn, cattle, iron, hides, slaves, and dogs, and taking back brass, ivory, amber ornaments, and vessels of glass. By these merchants the desirability of such a depôt as London, with its great and always navigable river, could not have been long overlooked.
In Caesar's second and longer invasion in the next year (54 B.C.), when his 28 many-oared triremes and 560 transports, &c, in all 800, poured on the same Kentish coast 21,000 legionaries and 2,000 cavalry, there is little doubt that his strong foot left its imprint near that cluster of stockaded huts (more resembling a New Zealand pah than a modern English town) perhaps already called London — Llyn-don, the "town on the lake." After a battle at Challock Wood, Caesar and his men crossed the Thames near Brentford, or at Coway Stakes, an ancient ford a little above Walton and below Weybridge. Cassivellaunus, King of Hertfordshire and Middlesex, had just slain in war Immanuent, King of Essex, and had driven out his son Mandubert. The Trinobantes, Mandubert's subjects, joined the Roman spearmen against the 4,000 scythed chariots of Cassivellaunus and the Catyeuchlani. Straight as the flight of an
