Special Papers

During the summer of 1974 a rare opportunity arose to excavate a section across Upper Thames Street, a major and ancient thoroughfare, at a point a little to the east of the Mermaid Theatre and close to the south-west corner of the intra-mural City. The investigation showed that the street had been in continuous existence, albeit much encroached upon in the late medieval period, from the 12/13th centuries. It also showed that its earliest deposition overlay a collapsed portion of a Roman wall. Lying on the presumed shore-line of the early City, this masonry was seen as a remnant of a riverside wall which had long been conjectured as a logical extension of the more enduring landwall but which had never been verified archaeologically. On the other hand, documentary evidence was rather more positive, and the fact that below the wall were found dumps of 6th to 8th-century date seemed in particular to support William FitzStephen’s statement of the 1170s that such a wall had existed but had succumbed at some earlier period to river erosion.

Accordingly, close observation was maintained in 1975-6 on redevelopment activity over a much more extensive area to the east and south of the original controlled excavation. At intervals considerably more evidence of the wall came to light, in varying states of decay and exhibiting differing methods of construction, over a total length of some 115m. To the west, where the sub-soil was firm, less elaborate foundations were required but on the less stable ground to the east a 40m stretch of wall was constructed upon a chalk raft supported by tightly packed rows of timber piles. Carbon 14 and dendrochronolgoical dating of these piles indicated that the wall was built in the 4th century, probably after AD 330. Certain of its construction methods share similarities with the apparently late Roman eastern group of bastions added to the landwall, and a further, more recently discovered, portion of the riverside wall close to the inner curtain of the Tower of London at the opposite end of the City has been provisionally dated on numismatic evidence to the 390s.

One peculiar characteristic of the western section of the wall was the re-use of sculputured stone blocks which on close examination were found to possess a dramatic and independent interest of their own. Most of the 52 blocks recovered can be assigned to one or other of two major monuments, of which one was an arch, richly decorated with figures of classical gods, including Minerva and Hercules, in relief, and surmounted by a frieze of the busts of deities, possibly representing the days of the week. Rare in Britain – it is in fact the first time that a detailed reconstruction could be made of the original appearance of a Roman arch in this country – and unique to London, the arch was probably not erected earlier than the late 2nd or early 3rd centuries. The other monument was a screen of gods, 6.20m long, carved on both sides and at one end, which presumably formed part of some larger monument. The remaining blocks included a relief of four (at variance with the more usual three) Mother Goddessess probably of 3rd-century date; and two altars commemorating the restoration of temples, one to Isis and the other probably to Jupiter, one of which records the name of an hitherto unknown Roman governor of Britain whose term of office was most likely within the years AD 251-9.

During the post-Roman period the gradually rising level of the Thames caused the southern face of the wall on the eastern part of the site to erode to about half its original width, and by the mid 12th century a gravel foreshore had formed against the surviving masonry. But while there is now every reason to respect FizStephen’s claim that the destruction of the wall in general was due to erosion, it was also clear from the present site that this was not the only cause. One feature of the wall in the western part of the site was that it had collapsed northward or inland, a phenomenon which strongly suggests deliberate demolition. It is unlikely that this remote section of the City waterfront was developed much before the mid 12th century at the earliest, and the present conclusion is that this demolition took place in the late 12th century before the superimposition of the earliest Thames Street level and before the construction of the timber waterfront to the south in the first half of the 13th century.the summer of 1974 a rare opportunity arose to excavate a section across Upper Thames Street, a major and ancient thoroughfare, at a point a little to the east of the Mermaid Theatre and close to the south-west corner of the intra-mural City. The investigation showed that the street had been in continuous existence, albeit much encroached upon in the late medieval period, from the 12/13th centuries. It also showed that its earliest deposition overlay a collapsed portion of a Roman wall. Lying on the presumed shore-line of the early City, this masonry was seen as a remnant of a riverside wall which had long been conjectured as a logical extension of the more enduring landwall but which had never been verified archaeologically. On the other hand, documentary evidence was rather more positive, and the fact that below the wall were found dumps of 6th to 8th-century date seemed in particular to support William FitzStephen’s statement of the 1170s that such a wall had existed but had succumbed at some earlier period to river erosion.

Accordingly, close observation was maintained in 1975-6 on redevelopment activity over a much more extensive area to the east and south of the original controlled excavation. At intervals considerably more evidence of the wall came to light, in varying states of decay and exhibiting differing methods of construction, over a total length of some 115m. To the west, where the sub-soil was firm, less elaborate foundations were required but on the less stable ground to the east a 40m stretch of wall was constructed upon a chalk raft supported by tightly packed rows of timber piles. Carbon 14 and dendrochronolgoical dating of these piles indicated that the wall was built in the 4th century, probably after AD 330. Certain of its construction methods share similarities with the apparently late Roman eastern group of bastions added to the landwall, and a further, more recently discovered, portion of the riverside wall close to the inner curtain of the Tower of London at the opposite end of the City has been provisionally dated on numismatic evidence to the 390s.

One peculiar characteristic of the western section of the wall was the re-use of sculputured stone blocks which on close examination were found to possess a dramatic and independent interest of their own. Most of the 52 blocks recovered can be assigned to one or other of two major monuments, of which one was an arch, richly decorated with figures of classical gods, including Minerva and Hercules, in relief, and surmounted by a frieze of the busts of deities, possibly representing the days of the week. Rare in Britain – it is in fact the first time that a detailed reconstruction could be made of the original appearance of a Roman arch in this country – and unique to London, the arch was probably not erected earlier than the late 2nd or early 3rd centuries. The other monument was a screen of gods, 6.20m long, carved on both sides and at one end, which presumably formed part of some larger monument. The remaining blocks included a relief of four (at variance with the more usual three) Mother Goddessess probably of 3rd-century date; and two altars commemorating the restoration of temples, one to Isis and the other probably to Jupiter, one of which records the name of an hitherto unknown Roman governor of Britain whose term of office was most likely within the years AD 251-9.

During the post-Roman period the gradually rising level of the Thames caused the southern face of the wall on the eastern part of the site to erode to about half its original width, and by the mid 12th century a gravel foreshore had formed against the surviving masonry. But while there is now every reason to respect FizStephen’s claim that the destruction of the wall in general was due to erosion, it was also clear from the present site that this was not the only cause. One feature of the wall in the western part of the site was that it had collapsed northward or inland, a phenomenon which strongly suggests deliberate demolition. It is unlikely that this remote section of the City waterfront was developed much before the mid 12th century at the earliest, and the present conclusion is that this demolition took place in the late 12th century before the superimposition of the earliest Thames Street level and before the construction of the timber waterfront to the south in the first half of the 13th century.

The purpose of the excavation was two-fold: to examine Roman terracing on the north bank of the Thames, seen to the west on either side of London Bridge in the 1920s, and to trace the line of the Roman Riverside Wall. (In 1974 the existence of the Riverside Wall, a late Roman addition to the waterfront, was not yet proven; the discoveries at Blackfriars were made a year later, in 1975-6.) A length of masonry supposed to form part of the Riverside Wall had been found about 95 m to the west, below the building frontage on the north side of Lower Thames Street, in 1911. Although the alignment, when projected, did not cross the present excavation trench, its plotting was not entirely satisfactory and further clarification seemed desirable. Moreover, the chance of excavating on the former river bank to the north of Thames Street was seen as a way of complementing the work then being undertaken on a sequence of Roman and later wharves at New Fresh Wharf, 45 m to the south-west.

The excavation revealed a series of artificial terracings of the river bank (Periods I-III). These had been undertaken in the late 1st and 2nd centuries AD and were represented by three sets of oak posts with horizontal planks retaining dumps of building rubble, soil and domestic refuse. These revetments, which had been buried or destroyed by the end of the 2nd century, may be the eastern continuations of more substantial box-structures excavated on either side of the likely line of the Roman bridge (at, or close to, the foot of Fish Street Hill) in 1920-9. It is clear that for up to 120 m on either side of the Roman bridge approach the northern bank was the subject of considerable terracing activity in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD. The most southerly of these structures may have functioned as a quay, but the evidence is inconclusive both on the sites excavated in the 1920s and at Billingsgate Buildings. While the levels of the revetments are comparable with what little is known of Roman tidal levels, no specifically river-lain deposits were found lying against or over them. It is possible that such deposits were removed or obscured after the 2nd century, but at the moment it seems safer to assume that the late 1st and early 2nd-century quay lay a little to the south, under the present Lower Thames Street.

The dumps behind the revements produced building materials such as tiles, opus signinum, tesserae and window glass, together with fragments of wall painting, decorative stone wall (?) inlay, and straw, possibly from thatched roofs. Although the provenance of this redeposited debris cannot be established, it is unlikely to have been brought from any great distance. Roman buildings have been recorded close by: for example, to the west, under the present Pudding Lane, where a ragstone and tile wall with an adjoining hypocaust was found in 1836-41, and to the north-west, under Monument Street, where a portion of tessellated pavement with an obscure inscription in smaller black tesserae was discovered in 1887. Neither of these buildings has been dated, but they presumably followed the establishment of the terracing in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries.

In addition to building material, the exceptionally rich deposits – waterlogged except for the top-most layers – produced a large quantity and range of Roman finds. Predominant among them was pottery. This consisted mainly of sherds from vessels associated with the transportation, storage and preparation of food, and included Spanish and Italian amphorae. The Roman diet is indicated by a variety of nuts, fruit and vegetable seeds, by a cheese press, by quernstones for grinding flour, and by the bones of marine and freshwater fish, domestic fowl and ox, sheep, horse, goat and pig. Domestic life is represented by items of personal ornamentation or cosmetic use, most notably by a large number of men’s, women’s and children’s leather shoes. Other household objects include ceramic lamps, needles, spindles, furniture elements and scraps of leather possibly from upholstery. Items such as a plasterer’s tool provide evidence of small-scale workshops of the 1st or 2nd centuries, and there are indications of shoe-making and repairing, cattle slaughtering, and bone, lead and bronze working. Besides local trading, the pottery reveals extensive links with Gaul and the Mediterranean, while writing tablets demonstrate the importance of London as a legal and administrative centre.

The site yielded practically no material definitely later than the late 2nd century, nor earlier than the 11th or 12th centuries. A series of pile foundations, supporting ragstone blocks set into a shallow ditch, appeared to have been built on the destroyed or buried remains of the revetments in the late Roman or early Saxon period (Period IV). The precise date and function of these features remains uncertain, but work on the south side of Lower Thames Street, where definite remains of the Riverside Wall have been located, may, in the future, help with their interpretation. Most susbsequent features and layers had been destroyed by a modern basement. All that survived were the bottoms of a Saxo-Norman wicker-lined pit and timber-lined well, and of a medieval wicker-lined pit.

[ Special Paper 4 (1980); derived from the published abstract]

The work conducted by the Museum of London at New Fresh Wharf – now the site of St Magnus House, Lower Thames Street – took place in three stages: two area excavations in 1974 and 1975, and a watching brief in 1978. Although the site stretches from Thames Street to the present river wall, only the northern third contained surviving archaeological strata. This report deals with finds of the Roman period, from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD; finds of the 10th to 12th centuries are described in Aspects of Saxo-Norman London 3: the Bridgehead and Billingsgate to 1200.

Overview

The excavations uncovered structures of three successive periods:

a 2nd-century river embankment wall, showing the limit of land reclamation at the end of that century;
an ambitious two-part quay installation, dated principally by dendrochronology to the decades AD 225-245;
the riverside city wall, running along the back of the 3rd-century quay. This was probably built in the years AD 255-70, and may have had grave consequences for the useful life of the quay.
In addition, many portable finds, especially those recovered from in and around the 3rd-century quay, have considerably advanced our knowledge of public, private and commercial life in Roman London.

The Roman quays and embankments

In the northernmost part of the site, actually under the southern pavement of Thames Street, traces of a timber embankment wall, made of piles and planks, were recorded. It was erected some time during the 2nd century, and marks a phase of land reclamation beyond the line of the 1st-century quays which are to be found on the north side of Thames Street.

Four metres to the south lay a second revetment. Though both revetments were of similar construction, river silts lay against the first but not the second. This suggests that the first formed a river embankment but that the second was merely the preparation for a new quay and further phase of reclamation. The quay itself was built out beyond the revetment, a further 5m into the contemporary river. The wall consisted of five tiers of large oak beams held in position by a framework of braces and piles. Sufficient of the structure remained in position to suggest at least fourteen stages of construction, starting with pile-driving and ending with the laying of the topmost tier of beams. The wooden framework was further stabilised by tons of earth and rubble, tipped around the timbers. The upper layers would have been rammed down to create a working surface. This dumped material – which included numerous imported goods as well as general household rubbish – was evidently culled from sources in the immediate area, some of which may have been warehouses.

Dating and parallels for the quays

Precise dating of the 3rd-century quay involves the evaluation of several different indicators, and the consideration of parallels both in this country and abroad. Tree-ring dating suggests that the latest of the quay timbers themselves were cut down after AD 209 but probably before AD 244. It is likely – to judge from what is known of Roman building practice – that such large timbers as these would have been used soon after felling. The felling date should therefore be close to the date of construction. On the other hand, a considered date for the latest pottery from the quay infill – samian ware from Rheinzarben in Germany – is AD 235-45. This discrepancy is not easily resolved. Delays in building, or the possibility that infilling was completed some time after the quay had been constructed in timber, can be considered but mostly rejected. On balance, the best that can be proposed is that the quay was built at some point in the bracket AD 225-45.

The form of construction, relying on piles and tieback braces, is found upstream of London Bridge at the same time (late 2nd/early 3rd century) and on the eastern part of the Custom House site slightly earlier (late 2nd century). The closest parallel, however, is in the 2nd-century quay at Xanten on the Rhine; the arrangement and size of timbers, details of jointing, and the use of consolidation material at least around the lower beams are very similar. The form generally appears elsewhere in late 1st and 2nd-century contexts, and so the St Magnus House structure is the latest known instance of it.

A second and contrasting type of construction, based on beams arranged in boxes, characterises the 1st-century quays to the north of Upper and Lower Thames Street, and certain 2nd-century works at the west end of the Custom House site and in Dover. The two types existed side by side and do not represent stages in an evolving technology. In fact, differences in the stability of the underlying strata may have governed the choice of design. Stable London Clay largely underlay the box-constructed quay at Custom House, whereas potentially unstable river silts and gravels were to be found at St Magnus House; here too the quay was built further out into the Roman river, at a point near the bridgehead where reclamation was more intensive.

Samian and other pottery

The monograph includes an extensive series of reports on the portable finds, chiefly the pottery. Approximately 88% of the pots dumped in and around the quays were imported – an astonishingly high proportion which, taken with the fact that many vessels are complete and apparently unused, suggests that the dumps may represent clearance from nearby shops or warehouses. Many of the vessels are in samian or black colour-coated ware and can, in turn, be divided into two groups: a Central Gaulish group, datable to c. AD 170-80, and an East Gaulish group of c. AD 235-45. Less familiar – and in much smaller, though still significant, quantities – are coarsewares and finewares from other production sites along the Rhine and Moselle: for example, mortaria from Speicher, near Trier, or Soller, near Bonn, and hunt beakers from Cologne. So too are there wares from the Pas-de-Calais/Picardy region of north-west Gaul and amphorae which, as a group, show a bias towards sources in north Africa and the east Mediterranean. Such Romano-British pottery as there is comes almost entirely from four sources: south Devon, Dorset, the Nene Valley and Colchester.

Other portable finds

Besides pottery, many other finds demonstrate that London’s prime purpose – at least up to the early 3rd century – was as a port. Some objects would have come by sea from other parts of Britain: roofing slates from north Wales and the Bristol region, jet pins from Whitby in Yorkshire, and coal from either south Wales or the Durham coalfield. A pilaster capital may have been imported from northern France. The business of the port was partly recorded, as letters, bills of account or transactions, on wooden writing tablets made from woods such as cedar, silver fir and Norway spruce.

Other finds reflect domestic life and the appearance of the Roman city more generally. Building stone was mostly imported from Kent, but fragments of Carrara marble and veneers of onyx marble, together with fragments of several different wall-paintings, show that some buildings were richly decorated. Large numbers of leather shoes were recovered, of which some are gilded and others have exaggerated broad toes – a style evidently fashionable in the early 3rd century. Clothing is represented by parts of leather jackets and, possibly, breeches, while inscribed offcuts are remnants of the leatherworking industry itself.

Dismantling of the quays, construction of the Riverside Wall

In the 240s London’s prospects must have looked encouraging, but within fifty years this had changed dramatically. Political and economic changes in the Roman empire brought about the collapse of the main north European markets which supplied London and Britain. From about AD 250 Saxon pirates began to disrupt the trade routes. The level of the river may have been dropping in relation to the land, causing silting and difficulties of access in the ports of south-east England.

The lifespan of the quay at St Magnus House was short. There is no evidence for use after about AD 260, barely twenty years after its construction. At about this time, moreover, a large wall was built to run along the full length of the quayside, about 8m behind the river frontage. The Riverside Wall here resembles the lengths found at Blackfriars and the Tower of London, and is dated by dendrochronology – as on the other sites – to AD 255-70. Although this was the time when some of the Saxon Shore forts were being built, the wall here is closer in its style of construction to the earlier traditions of architecture embodied in London’s early 3rd-century landward wall. The quay was no longer required on the same scale as before, and parts were dismantled.

The first post-Roman structures on the site were rubble banks and stakes of the 10th century, laid against the decayed and eroded base of the Riverside Wall.

Two hundred and thirty-four articulated skeletons from the early medieval parish cemetery of St Nicholas Shambles, off Newgate Street in the City of London, were excavated by the Museum of London in 1975-7 (sitecode: GPO75). They are dated archaeologically to the 11th and 12th centuries. Six grave-types were identified, though the majority were in simple graves. The presence of coffins could not be established with certainty, though fragments of wood were present in many graves.

Demographic and osteological data were compared with other medieval populations. Ranges and means of stature were consistent with comparable groups. The skulls provide a cranial form intermediate between Anglo-Saxon dolicephaly (‘long- headed’) and the later medieval bracycephaly (‘round-headed’). Certain cranial and dental characteristics may suggest family subgroups in the population.

Evidence of disease on the bones was infrequent. Reconstruction of the dentition permitted an assessment to be made of the general health of the population. Nutritional disease in the form of osteoporosis did occur, bone defects being caused by anaemia possibly resulting from an iron-deficient diet. Osteoarthritis was found in many skeletons as a degenerative disease affecting most of the joints, but especially the vertebral column. One form of spinal degenerative disorder was four times more common in men than in women and may have been related to lifting activities. Cancerous tumours were few and not malignant. No evidence of infections such as tuberculosis was observed. Paget’s disease was absent. In general few injuries suffered during life were apparent and fractures were relatively uncommon. Individual cases of note included a middle-aged man with a badly affected right arm, with a shoulder joint damaged through illness contracted probably during childhood. A younger man exhibited a developmental disorder that had interfered with the normal growth of his limbs. A girl with her left leg missing had survived to be a teenager, and another, tall and probably overweight, had been left with a pronounced limp. Of particular note was the partial skeleton of a woman who died in childbirth. The high incidence of certain traits suggested that many of the skeletons were of related individuals. Analysis of the cemetery produced evidence for possible family groupings.

In advance of detailed publication of the excavation of the church and the topographical setting of the cemetery, a provisional discussion is offered of the various grave-types and possible evidence of grave-side ritual.

This, the first volume of a major re-assessment of the development of Saxo-Norman London, is based on the archaeological evidence from seven sites excavated between 1976 and 1985 in the Billingsgate and Cheapside areas of the City of London. There is little evidence for occupation on any of the sites in the mid Saxon period, when the main focus of the settlement lay to the west of the Roman walled town in the Aldwych-Strand area. All seven sites excavated saw substantial development from the late Saxon period onwards. In Parts 1 and 2 of this volume, the background to the project and the dating methodology are explained, and the results of each excavation summarised. In Parts 3 to 6 the often fragmentary remains of some 50 Saxo-Norman buildings are catalogued, described and discussed.

The detailed study of this sometimes poorly-preserved material has revealed evidence of different building types, traditions and techniques. Three main types of structure are represented, and the characteristics and possible functions of each type are considered. The single-storied surface-laid buildings seem to represent the standard domestic building set directly against the street frontage; sunken-floored structures were out-houses or storage sheds usually found in the yard area behind the main buildings, while cellared buildings were a uniquely urban type of structure, in which the sub-surface element was set beneath or behind the principal range.

The wide variety of structural techniques observed include the use of earth-fast posts, staves, wattlework and walls founded on baseplates. The evidence for floors, doors, hearths and ovens is also discussed, and reconstructions of two building-types are proposed in Part 7.

In addition, the excavations throw light on the origin of parts of the street-grid in the City through examination of the streets themselves and the layout of the associated properties. It is suggested in Part 8 that the medieval streets just north of Billingsgate were not all laid out in one phase in the 9th-10th century, but represent a gradual development in which primary and secondary streets can be identified.

Detailed reports on the pottery and other finds from the sites discussed here can be found in the companion volume, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London 2: finds and environmental evidence, edited by Alan Vince.

In the late 9th century the centre of settlement in London was moved, almost certainly by royal instigation, from the undefended wic along the Strand into the walls of the Roman city. The growth of London in the 10th and 11th centuries was phenomenal and by the middle of the 11th century the town was a thriving port with contacts in Scandinavia, the Rhineland and Northern France.

In this volume various studies of finds and environmental evidence from sites within the walled city and dating between the late 9th and mid 12th centuries are presented. The first of the eight unequal parts is a brief essay on the nature of the deposits from which the evidence was derived.

A corpus of Saxon pottery from the City of London is presented in Part 2, together with the reasoning behind the chronological framework which underlies most of the other papers. Furthermore, by combining petrological analysis with a study of pottery from contemporary sites in the surrounding countryside it has been possible to establish the source, or source area, of much of the City’s pottery.

Small finds composed of antler, bone, copper alloy, fired clay, glass, iron, ivory, lead, leather, stone and wood are considered in Part 3. All stratified 10th and 11th-century small finds are included here, except those from sites where no stratigraphic data was available. The leatherwork is of particular interest since there is sufficient of it to extend the sequence of styles and techniques previously established for the 12th to 15th centuries back to the 10th century.

Recent excavations have yielded relatively few Saxon or Norman coins, but the study of earlier finds and the comparison of coins from within the walled area with coins from the surrounding area is crucial to the interpretation of the pottery and other finds. An essay and illustrated catalogue of these coin finds is therefore included here as Part 4, while a companion paper on associated lead pieces postulates that these objects were used in some way as receipts for toll.

The problems of residuality and contamination which affect the studies of pottery and small finds also affect botanical remains and are considered in Part 5. Despite these problems the value of the study of botanical remains from London can be demonstrated. In Part 5.ii a study of the absolute frequency of parasite eggs within a deposit has shown that it is possible to differentiate between deposits which are composed almost entirely from decomposed human cess, those which contain an appreciable cess content and those with other, incidental, constituents.

In Part 6 the preliminary results of a study of late Saxon crucibles is presented. It demonstrates that Stamford ware crucibles were preferred to those from other sources, especially for the melting of silver.

In Part 7 two short reports on scientific dating of late Saxon deposits, using dendrochronology and archaeomagnetism respectively, are published.

Finally, in Part 8, the topographic and functional development of London from the late Roman period to the Norman Conquest is summarised, using information both from this and from the preceding volume, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London 1: building and street development. The main concern of this paper is to establish the archaeological context of Saxon finds from within the walls of the City, although in order to do this it is necessary to look outside the walls.

Following the printed report are microfiche on which will be found site by site reports enabling the user to relate stratigraphy, pottery, small finds and environmental data from a deposit.

This volume describes features dating to the period c 400 to c 1200 from four waterfront excavations of 1974-84 in the City of London; two (New Fresh Wharf, NFW74, and Billingsgate Lorry Park, BIG82) immediately below the late Saxon and medieval bridge, and two (Swan Lane, SWA81, and Seal House, SH74) just above it. In conjunction with a review of the available documentary evidence, the archaeological findings provide an outline of development for the area around the northern bridgehead and the harbour of Billingsgate (first mentioned c 1000) in the late Saxon and early medieval period.

During the period 400-900 the evidence on these four sites confirms recent suggestions that the Roman city was largely deserted; the Roman waterfront was gradually obscured by silts of the rising river, and the Roman bridge, if it still survived, probably did not form a focus of activity or public resort. There is archaeological evidence for a shift in the location of settlement from the Strand to within the Roman walls, some time in the late 9th or early 10th century. Documentary evidence demonstrates that at least one block of land near the waterfront, south of St Paul’s, was laid out in the last decade of the 9th century; and in all likelihood its occupiers were engaging in trade, perhaps through a beach-market on the site of Queenhithe. There is, however, evidence that during the 10th and early 11th centuries London looked inland rather than abroad for its commercial well-being, and this local or at best inter-regional trading network has parallels elsewhere in Europe.

The earliest post-Roman structural activities discovered between Billingsgate and London bridge were the jetty and associated rubble bank at New Fresh Wharf, dated to the late 10th or early 11th century. On three of the four sites there followed embankments of clay and timber during the first half of the 11th century; at New Fresh Wharf the embankments were constructed in parts which became individual medieval properties by 1200, suggesting that they may have been in individual ownership from the beginning. The embankments would have been suitable for the berthing of the smaller kind of shipping then prevalent, and they probably formed part of London’s expanding harbour facilities in the 11th century. The relationship of the various embankments to the rising river level is also considered.

The development of the waterfront area south of Thames Street, between the bridge and Billingsgate, can be seen within the context of the late 10th- and early 11th-century development of the immediate neighbourhood and of the city as a whole. The waterfront ends of north-south streets served as localised minor markets, situated at the only places on the foreshore to which there was public access and initially co-existing with the major harbours at Queenhithe, Billingsgate and Botolph’s Wharf. The building of the bridge by 1000 (though the precise date is not yet certain) symbolises not only London’s re-established role as a distributive centre for imports or a collection-point for exports, but also its nodal position in the local and regional road network.

Development of the two sites above the bridge after 1050 was comparatively unspectacular, but below the bridge two further phases can be seen: by about 1100, the final demolition of the Roman riverside wall and the construction of the churches of St Magnus and St Botolph south of the new thoroughfare, Thames Street; secondly, the erection of stone buildings on the reclaimed land during the 12th and early 13th centuries, concomitant with the crystallisation of St Botolph’s Wharf as an entry-point of civic and greater significance, a place where royal customs were received in 1200-1.

The study also comprises detailed tables describing the dating evidence (including dendrochronology) and summaries of the artefacts.

The embanking of the river Thames in the late Saxon period and the subsequent extensions of the bank throughout the medieval period incorporated a sequence of timber revetments, of which 25 closely-dated examples are described in this report. They range in date from the 10th to the 14th century and were selected from the sequences excavated on four sites, Billingsgate Lorry Park (1982-3; BIG82), Seal House (1974; SH74), Trig Lane (1974-86; TL74) and Thames Exchange (1988-9; TEX88). A late 17th-century revetment from the City of London Boys’ School site (1986-7; BOY86) is also considered. This study examines the structures primarily as examples of medieval timber building practice, rather than as waterfront installations. Although all the revetments were designed to achieve the same end, there were significant differences between the techniques used to construct the early examples and those employed in the later ones. It is argued here that those differences reflect wide-ranging changes in vernacular timber-building practice in general, most notably the transition from earthfast to timber-framed building. Some of the implications of these developments are considered with reference to further examples of well-preserved waterfront carpentry from London. This part of the report (Chapters 1-4) had its genesis in a thesis prepared by Gustav Milne for Birkbeck College, University of London in 1985.

In Chapter 5, those conclusions are compared with the study of a range of timbers derived from medieval buildings which once stood in the City. This important assemblage was recovered from the Billingsgate Lorry Park site, where the house timbers were reused in waterfront structures. Once again, the focus is on the development of timber-framed buildings in the medieval period, but this time through the examination of surviving baseplates and in particular the changing form of mortises. This assessment is based upon a dissertation written by Trevor Brigham in 1984 for University College, London.

In Chapter 6, Damian Goodburn presents another approach to the study of changes in medieval timber building, this time through consideration of the changes in timber-working practice, tools and woodland management. This is related to the changing medieval woodscape. The evidence was derived from examination of a selection of timbers recently excavated from London waterfront sites.

In conclusion, Chapter 7 brings together the evidence presented in the previous chapters. An assessment is then made of the building traditions and types of timber buildings which, it is now suggested, would have been present in medieval London.