King Lucius of Britain by David J Knight

Author:David J Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: King Lucius of Britain
ISBN: 9780752474465
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

THE SECOND-CENTURY ROMAN BASILICA OF LONDINIUM AND ST PETER-UPON-CORNHILL

One of the most striking features of Roman Londinium was its forum basilica. By c.100 it had become immense even by Roman standards, measuring 166m x 167m; approximately five times larger than the original structure. This may have been in response to Londinium advancing from the status of municipium to colonia.52 Of interest to our study is a sequence of observations regarding the relationship between St Peter-upon-Cornhill and the Roman basilica.

In 1934 Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler made an important point: there is every likelihood that the London basilica and forum were of the type represented at Silchester, Caerwent and elsewhere, and so approximated to the normal plan of the headquarters-building of a Roman fortress. In the military headquarters the central room at the back of the basilica was the official regimental shrine and it is likely enough that the corresponding room (emphasised at Silchester by an apse) at the back of the civil basilica fulfilled an equivalent function, as a sort of municipal chapel. Today, the high altar of St Peter’s, Cornhill, stands over the site of the central room at the back of the London basilica. Does St Peter’s thus represent, in all topographical literalness, a continuous tradition from the time when Christianity first became the official religion of Roman London, with an official altar in the old municipal shrine?53

In 1969 Merrifield wrote that the Roman basilica ‘served as courts of justice, town hall, and public meeting-place, and would also have contained the curia, or local senate house, the position of which is not yet known’.54 In 1987 Peter Marsden published a composite plan of the early medieval structures on the forum and basilica site of London. Including the Saxon church of All Hallows he commented that St Dionis Backchurch, St Michael Cornhill and St Peter-upon-Cornhill ‘were constructed on the ruins of the basilica and forum, though whether or not they reused standing Roman walls is not known’, adding ‘However, it is interesting that St Peter upon Cornhill church was allegedly founded in AD 179’.55

The northern extent of the basilica was not discovered until 1982 during excavations at 68 Cornhill, and subsequent excavation has established that by the early second century the northern range ‘comprised a single row of offices and a long portico which ran the length of the Nave and North Aisle, sub-divided by nonstructural partitions’.56 One particular room (number 13 in Marsden is number 2 in Brigham, measuring 7.5m square57) had in situ dark blue wall plaster. Immediately west of this is a room (number 12 in Marsden58) underneath Gracechurch Street and overlain to the west by the eastern wall of St Peter-upon-Cornhill, covered in ‘yellow panels with a black border, on a yellow ground with touches of red’.59

This room was given a tessellated floor at a raised level, suggesting it ‘may have had a higher status than normal, possibly acting as an antechamber for the aedes or shrine-room’. It is possible this aedes ‘occupied a central position in the Northern Range … beneath the east end of the church of St Peter’s, Cornhill’.

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