Londinium, the capital of Britannia

There was no single dominant religion in the Roman empire. Various faiths co-existed together, including the worship of Greek and Roman gods, and in Londinium there were most likely to have also been followers of pagan beliefs. There were various religious temples in the town and one was certainly for worshippers of Mithras, the remains of which were discovered in 1954. Christianity was confined to Greek-speaking parts of the empire in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries but became prominent during the reign of Constantine in the early 4^th century. It was slow to become widespread in Britain, and the earliest-known Romano-British Christian martyr was Alban of Verulamium, executed in 209. There is little evidence of Chistianity in Londinium, although certainly Restitutus, Bishop of London, attended the Council of Arles in 314.

Romans buried their dead outside of their towns. Londinium had four main cemeteries, each one beside a road leading out from the town. On the west side there was one beside the road to Silchester, in the north either side of Ermine Street, in the east at what is now the Minories, and in the south beside the Dover road.

Opposite the main entrance to the government building on what is now Cannon Street was the London Stone, made of Clipsham stone imported from the Midlands. It is a great survivor and is still located in more or less the same place, now set into the wall of an office building. By the Middle Ages its original purpose had been long forgotten and it became a legendary fixture of the city. Most probably it was used by the Romans as a milestone from which distances to London were measured.

There were virtually no local tribespeople living in the area before Londinium was created by the Romans in the 1^st century. Almost the entire population of the early town, both before and after Boudicca’s rebellion, were Roman immigrant citizens and their slaves, mostly from Gaul. As time went on many native British took on the Roman lifestyle. The people of Londinium in the 2^nd century and later could probably trace their ancestry back to various sources in Britannia, Gaul, Germany, Italy, Spain and other parts of the empire. They were unlikely to have thought of themselves as anything other than Roman residents of Londinium, living according to the same customs as in other towns. By the end of the 2^nd century there was no distinction between Roman and British people living in Londinium. The language spoken by most would probably have been Latin patois. In addition to the resident population there were large numbers of troops, officials, civil servants and trades-people continually passing through, and it was as a very cosmopolitan town.

At the time of the fire of 120AD Londinium, excluding the fort, covered about 80 to 100 acres. The wall around the town, constructed in the early 3^rd century, enclosed 326 acres, one of the largest cities in the entire empire, exceeded in western Europe only by Rome, Milan, Nîmes, Trier and few others. It indicated that Londinium had increased in size by perhaps three times during the 2^nd century. The creation of the wall thereafter limited the expansion of the town.

London reached its peak in the 3^rd and 4^th centuries. By that time the population spanned a range of classes and types of people, from the extremely wealthy at one extreme to paupers at the other. In between were the middle classes, tradespeople and slaves. The size of the population was probably a little over 100,000 in the area almost exactly the same as the present-day City of London, often referred to as the ‘square mile’. That number that would not be achieved again until the 14th century.

Sources include: John Morris ‘Londinium – London in the Roman Empire’; Simon Webb ‘Life in Roman London’; Dominic Perring ‘Roman London’; Walter Thornbury ‘Old & New London’ (1897); Dan Cruickshank ‘Spitalfields’.

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