The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson

the old Roman system that civilisation all but collapsed. Londoners forgot their Latin. They forgot how to read; they forgot how to repair a bridge. Between the years AD 400 and 850 we find no traces of any human occupation of Southwark. There is only one conclusion: that pontoon bridge of Aulus Plautius, repaired and reinforced by generations of Londoners, had decayed and toppled into the river. The vital link was gone. There were still some hairy-looking Londoners living around what is now Covent Garden – peasants and swineherds – but the population had plummeted.

      In AD 800 Baghdad had a million people, a glorious circle of scholars and poets, and a library of thousands of books on everything from algebra to medicine to watch-making. By the same year London had returned to barbarism. They were neither Roman nor Christian, until in the early seventh century a man was sent from Rome to try to rescue the situation. His name was Mellitus, which means ‘honeyed’, and you have a job to find Londoners who have heard of him.

       Mellitus

      He brought back Christianity and got the bum’s rush

      ‘Mellitus?’ said the guide with a faint air of surprise. I felt as if I had gone into Waitrose and asked for something quaint – like a hogshead of mead. But Vivien Kermath is one of the accredited red-sashed guides of St Paul’s Cathedral. She knows her stuff.

      ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Mellitus. AD 604. He built the first of several churches there have been on this site. Come this way.’

      ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘There isn’t any physical evidence of the original building, is there?’

      ‘No,’ said Vivien, ‘but we have an icon of Mellitus.’

      ‘An icon?’ I boggled.

      We walked slowly through the great church of Christopher Wren, past memorials of Nelson and Wellington. We passed the spot where Lady Diana Spencer consecrated her ill-fated union to the Prince of Wales. We passed the list of former deans, including John Donne, and his illustrious predecessor, Alexander Nowell (1560), the Londoner who first worked out how to bottle beer – ‘probably his greatest contribution to humanity,’ said Vivien.

      Right at the far eastern end of the church we came to the American memorial chapel, and there – perched above an illuminated book recording the names of the 28,000 Americans who gave their lives in the Second World War – is Mellitus.

      To be accurate, it is a rather recent and brightly painted icon-style portrait of how Mellitus might have looked, presented to the cathedral by the Greek Orthodox Church.

      I stared at his long thin nose and his deep-set brown eyes, and tried to think myself back into the mindset of this valiant Christian saint, this Roman abbot who had been sent here on his dangerous mission more than 1400 years ago.

      Behind Mellitus was London, tightly walled and neatly roofed, with an anachronistic dome of St Paul’s bulging to heaven. Showing off, I deciphered the Greek quotation on Mellitus’ open Bible.

      ‘And he who sat upon the throne said, behold, I make everything new.’

      To make everything new. That was the mission of this Roman bishop to London. Fat chance.

      Having paid my respects to the icon, I went out and stood on the steps of St Paul’s, and imagined the terrible scene that greeted him.

      Roman London had waxed and waned over the years since Hadrian left. Some buildings fell into disrepair, but other notable structures were erected, including the two-mile wall that can still be seen, intermittently girdling the city, and which we think was built in around AD 200.

      And then in the third century the Roman Empire entered a period of sustained inflation and chaos. London began to suffer. Lines of supply became too long. Civil servants went unpaid. Morale fell. By AD 410 the Saxon raids had become so terrifying that Londoners issued a desperate appeal to the emperor, Honorius – who deserves to go down in history as the man who gave this country a deep childhood rejection complex.

      Sorry, said Honorius, no can do. The legions could not be spared. In 446 the Londoners tried one last time, begging for help from the great general Aetius.

      ‘The Saxons drive us into the sea, and then the sea drives us back into the arms of the Saxons! It’s a massacre,’ they wailed.

      It was no use. London was forsaken, no longer deemed to be part of the empire. Rome readopted the crushing verdict of Augustus, that our country was not worth the bones of a single legionary.

      Nothing now stood in the way of the most powerful Germanic tribes, and over they came – Hengist, Horsa, the lot of them, and the Romano-Londoners were put to the sword or driven to the Celtic fringes of the country. When Mellitus arrived at the place where I now stood, on what is now the crown of Ludgate Hill, he saw a post-apocalyptic landscape, a scene to bring despair to a proud Roman heart.

      In my mind’s eye I erased the buses and the tourists, and I levelled the banks and the Costa coffees, and I could see London as it appeared in 604. The baths and the amphitheatre were wrecked, and swine were kept in the atria of the old villas. The secret of the hypocausts was lost to Britain, and it would be centuries before Londoners rediscovered central heating.

      The governor’s palace had tumbled to the ground, and huge tracts of the city – where once tens of thousands of ambitious Roman Londoners had lived and dreamed – were covered in black earth. Archaeologists are divided as to whether this dark soil indicates some catastrophe, or whether the land had simply been turned over to farming.

      Such people as remained were called names like Cathwulf and Ceawlin and, let’s face it, folks (or volks), they were essentially German. They had taken off the togas that Agricola had taught them to wear, and they wore trousers. Yes, the barbarians wore the trousers in London now. Yet it was worse than that; almost three centuries after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, they now believed in the bosky German pantheon, and that their rulers were descended from Woden, to whom, every November, they made prodigious sacrifices of cows and pigs, so that the month was known as ‘blodmonath’.

      In the words of Rowan Williams, when Mellitus arrived in London, ‘he found almost no relic of the Christian presence.’

      The bishop had a plan. He gazed about himself there on the top of Ludgate hill, and his eye settled on a dilapidated Roman temple. That would do, he thought.

      His mission had been conceived in AD 591, when Pope Gregory had been mooching about a slave market in Rome. He spotted some male slaves with fair skin and golden hair. Where do that lot come from? he asked.

      They are English, the auctioneer replied – or ‘Angli sunt.’

      Gregory clapped his hands and made a famous joke: ‘Haud Angli, sed Angeli!’ (‘Not Angles, but Angels!’) And tell me, he asked, are they Christian?

      Unfortunately not, said the auctioneer. Right, said Pope Gregory. We’ll see about that.

      First he sent Augustine, in 596, and Augustine had a remarkable coup. King Aethelberht of Kent was himself a pagan, but his wife Bertha had Christian leanings. Soon Aethelberht was won for Christ, and Augustine appealed for reinforcements. Business was brisk, he reported back to Rome, but he needed more props. Vestments, altar decorations, chasubles, religious texts – that kind of thing. Get them over here quick, he urged the Pope.

      Gregory sent Mellitus and a handful of others, together with a celebrated letter on how to convert the heathen Brits. Whatever you do, said Gregory, don’t rush it. Don’t try to wean them off their pagan festivals and sacrifices. Let them enjoy it; let the fat and gravy run down their chins – but just tell them it is all to the glory of God. And don’t tear down their temples, Gregory advised. Just build new huts on the side of the old shrines.

      Somewhere on the site of what is now our cathedral, the Roman Mellitus persuaded Saeberht, the nephew of Aethelberht, to let him construct a church. In the ruins