THE STEELYARD.
Tacitus (A.D. 62) designates London as famous for many merchants and the abundance of its merchandise. “Londinium copia negociatorum et commeatu maxime celeberrimum.” This point of time from whence the authentic annals of London proceed was little more than a century later than the first invasion of Britain by Julius Cæsar, and only nineteen years after the expedition under Aulus Plautius in the reign of Claudius (A.D. 43), when Britain became subject to Roman domination. The Trinobantine metropolis thus becomes associated with the earliest of the cities whose resources have been maintained up to the present time, when, as regards its population and the extent of that commercial status the renown whereof originates with our earliest knowledge of its existence, it is admitted to stand unrivalled among cities of the modern world. The city of the Trinobantes, it is concluded, was situated on the slope which extends from St. Paul’s churchyard to the site of Dowgate, and the contiguous wharf of the Steelyard. The name of Dowgate is derived by Pennant from Dwr, in the Celtic water, as water gate. The line of Watling Street probably still represents the main thoroughfare of the Trinobantine city, as it does the prætorian way of Roman Londinium. This appears to have proceeded from St. Albans, the Roman Verulamium, and entered London by way of Holborn at a gate on the site of the present Newgate, and reaching Dowgate, to have communicated by a trajectus or ferry with the road called Stoney Street in Southwark, which led to Dover and Richborough, the Ritupæ or Ad Portum Ritupis of the Romans, whose vast walls continue in the south, like the Picts’ wall in the more northern part of this island, a noble monument of Roman intercourse. The position of London must originally have been one of considerable natural strength, being fronted on the south by the expansive estuary of the Thames, which is presumed by Sir Christopher Wren to have spread as far as the opposite hill of Camberwell, the embankments whereby it was subsequently curbed being still traceable, and which Wren considered to have been of Roman construction.
It must be noted, with reference to the site of the London of that period in contiguity to such a flood, that it had the disadvantage of lying considerably lower than the present level, and hence it may be supposed that it must have needed some strong embankment, to preserve the lower part of the city from immersion, and evidences of such a work have come under observation in the discovery of the trunks of trees closely rammed and interlaced with branches, so as to form a very effective barrier against the encroachment of the tide. The stream called Langbourne, which sprang from the marshy ground now occupied by Fenchurch Street, and the Wallbrooke, which rose in the marshes of Finsbury, and ran into the Thames to the east, with the river Fleet to the west of the city, and the marshes that bounded its northern side, sufficed to render its position nearly insular. Out of the limited river frontage thus circumscribed, the wharfs in question include a considerable space; and although history does not point to the precise locality of the trade for which London had become celebrated at the commencement of its annals, yet it carries us so far back as to justify the presumption that here was the original centre and focus of British commerce. Here, within the walls of the Steelyard, the Easterlings, or merchants of Almaigne had their port and their warehouses, according to existing documentary evidence, at least as early as the reign of Ethelred; and at this point the wealth of primitive Britain, consisting of wool, hides, tin, lead, and corn, was exchanged for the manufactured goods of the traders of Brabant and Flanders, who, having originally little or no superfluity of natural produce, were under the necessity of obtaining the raw material in return for the produce of their superior skill in handicraft. As until a period much later, we were not a ship-building people, the trade of London was for several centuries engrossed by the German merchants of the Steelyard, and the entire freightage to and from the continent carried on by means of their shipping.
Through Flanders and Brabant lay the high road to the old imperial capital north of the Alps,—Cologne, the Colonia Agrippina of the Romans—and it was evident that the merchants of the Steelyard were the medium by which we dealt largely with that city; but it is not until the reign of Henry the Second, at a time when Cologne was the largest and most prosperous city in Germany, that we find the record of a busy traffic between the two marts.
The mercantile alliance between this country and Germany was greatly promoted by the marriage of Maud, the eldest daughter of Henry, to Henry the Lion, the mightiest prince of the empire, and who held the two important duchies of Saxony and Bavaria; but, being ultimately subdued and driven into exile by Frederick Barbarossa, he forfeited all his lands except Brunswick and Lunenburgh, which were settled upon his wife, and found an asylum at Rouen and Westminster. A token of the kindly relation between England and Cologne appears when Richard Cœur-de-Lion obtained his release from the thraldom of Henry the Sixth of Germany, at the exorbitant ransom of 150,000 marks of silver. He passed through Cologne; and Adolphus Berg, the Archbishop, leading him into the Cathedral of St. Peter, in presence of a great multitude of knights and citizens, intoned himself the chaunt of the day, “I know that the Lord hath sent his angel, and hath delivered me out of the hand of Herod, and from all expectation of the people of the Jews.” The king, in acknowledgment of this joyful reception, granted to the citizens of Cologne, in a charter dated Liège, February the 16th, 1194, that they should henceforth be free of a duty of two shillings a year, which they had been bound to pay as a tax to the crown for their Guildhall in London, and that they, without any restriction, should have the liberty to travel throughout his realm, and to sell and buy at all the market-places, wherever and whenever they pleased. It was in grateful remembrance of this boon that the bishop and citizens, a few years after, united to promote the election of Otho the Fourth, Richard’s
