London and the Grim's Ditches

Abstract

In considering the question whether London did or did not survive as a substantially intact administrative unit throughout the Pagan Saxon period, Sir Laurence Gomme and others have laid stress upon the supposedly Roman origin of the wide territorial rights of the medieval Londoners. These rights, it has been claimed, take us ‘behind the Norman conquest, and behind the Anglo-Saxon rule also, for there is nothing in Anglo-Saxon institutions to which [they] can be referred’: they represent the old ‘territorium ’ of Roman London and are good evidence, therefore, of an unbroken civic tradition from Roman times. The doubtful details with which enthusiasm or fantasy have tended to enrich this theory do not necessarily deprive it of essential validity; and I venture to think that it is in fact rather more securely founded than Gomme's own statement of it would lead us to infer.