forced to explain himself and his city to this effulgent vision from Rome. At last the Pope appeared from his Alitalia jet, evidently exhausted but still somehow glowing – like a sugared almond – in his white vestments and scarlet slippers.
‘It all goes back to 410,’ I said, when we were on a sofa together in the Royal Lounge.
He looked at me keenly, as though trying to remember what had happened at teatime.
What I meant, I babbled, was that the decision of Honorius was of huge psycho-historical importance for this country. Britain was unlike so many other parts of the Roman Empire in that we underwent a complete reversion.
A city that had once been entirely Roman and entirely Christian had lapsed, had lurched back into the arms of paganism and sin.
And if time had allowed, I would have gone on to blurt my feeling that there would always be a sub-tectonic paganism and wildness about London; and that our fifth-century experience of a sundering from Rome – and a betrayal by Rome – would always leave us with a subconscious mistrust of any great continental scheme for a religious or a political union.
I was about to tell him of my theory that the umbilical severing by Honorius was a partial explanation for everything from Henry VIII to the British refusal to join the Euro.
Luckily for the Holy Father, I had only embarked on a couple of sentences when a cavalcade of cardinals came to take him to his hotel.
‘Very interesting!’ he said.
***
It is easy to laugh at poor Bishop Mellitus, hounded out of London by the ungrateful pagans, but in recapturing the city – and the country – for Christianity, we could surely argue that he was a figure of decisive historical importance.
Imagine if he had never been able to found that frail wooden Church of St Paul’s, or to replant the tender bloom of faith in the blackened soil of post-Roman London. Imagine if the British elite had continued – to this day – to swear by brooks and glades and rocks and not by Jesus Christ. The British Empire would frankly have had a very different flavour. So would the story of the United States of America. We would be talking about ‘one nation, indivisible under Woden’, and instead of Christmas or Thanksgiving, I expect we would all be complaining about the excessive commercialisation of Bloodmonath.
This fantasy will of course be dismissed by believers in a divine Christian plan, but for the next three hundred years after Mellitus the pagans were never far away, and their methods were vicious.
Of Mellitus’ church there is no sign today, and indeed there is no trace of early Saxon habitation in the old Roman London. The Saxons moved out west to huddled settlements at Aldwych and Covent Garden, and up the Thames came the enemy.
One man can take much of the credit for beating them off, and for reoccupying and rebuilding the ancient city. After centuries of decay, he was sufficiently literate to revive the memory of Rome.
He restored London and suffers from being a dead white male
It was only a hundred years ago that Britain could claim to be the greatest power on Earth. Royal Navy Dreadnoughts roamed the seas. Statues were raised in honour of the founder of the Navy, an axe-wielding, cross-gartered fellow with a flowing beard and deep-set eyes beneath a kind of Santa Claus hat.
Every child in England knew his name, and at one festival in his honour Lord Rosebery made a speech in which, among other superlative compliments, he hailed Alfred as ‘the ideal Englishman, the perfect sovereign, the pioneer of England’s greatness.’ E A Freeman, the Whig historian, later called him ‘the most perfect character in history.’
Alfred has not only a claim to be the father of the navy, and therefore of Empire and the entire supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon world – still just about alive at the beginning of the twenty-first century – but he also revived learning in a benighted land, he beat off a sadistic pagan enemy, he united his country and will go down as a man who saved London from oblivion.
And yet today Alfred is almost ludicrously unfashionable. His images are being lost or covered up; his statue in Wantage is regularly vandalised. Children are taught nothing about him: it is as if we are determined to send him back to the Dark Ages from which he rescued us.
In so far as we have relics of Saxon London before Alfred, they are dispiriting stuff. There are broken-toothed combs carved from the shoulder bones of sheep. There are pewter baubles you might expect to find at Camden Lock Market, except not so good.
There is the splotchy-glazed primary school pottery, and when you sit in one of the conjectural wooden dwellings in the Museum of London you have the impression of hippy squalor. There is no brick, no stone, no frescoes, no mosaic and certainly no public sanitation of a kind the Romans had used.
Perhaps some Anglo-Saxon historians will insist that we are talking of a golden age – but you have only to squat in that reconstructed hut to smell the smoke in your matted hair and the aromas of the pigs, and soon you feel a Dark Age dankness seeping up your ankles, to be followed by the chilblains and the pustules and an overall life expectancy of thirty-two.
The population had fallen cataclysmically since the days of Hadrian – to perhaps a few thousand. Londoners owed a distant allegiance to Essex or to Offa, the brutish and illiterate king of Mercia. They had moved out of the old Roman city, apparently because of some superstitious dread of the ruins.
Still, it seems there was something to be said for Lundenwic, the area they settled around the Strand and Aldwych. We have found pots that show there was busy trade with Merovingian Europe. In the 1980s, excavations around Covent Garden found a street with about sixty houses in it.
In the words of the Venerable Bede, London was still ‘a mart of many nations resorting to it by land and sea’. In spite of its decline, London at the beginning of the ninth century was still probably the richest and most important place in the country – in a not very hotly contested field. Things were about to get a good deal worse.
There is a sense in which you could say that the Anglo-Saxons had it coming. They were, after all, predators themselves. They were Germans, blond-haired toughs from the plain between the Elbe and the Weser, and they had behaved so aggressively towards the existing population – killing them and kicking them out wherever they could – that the Byzantine historian Procopius got the impression that Britain was actually two countries: a place called Brettania, opposite Spain, and Brettia, a more Germanic place opposite the mouth of the Rhine.
Even during the reign of Alfred the Saxons continued to persecute the Romano–Celtic Britons, driving them west to Wales and Cornwall. Alfred’s maternal grandfather was a royal butler called Oslac, and it was one of Oslac’s boasts that his family had killed all the British they could find in the Isle of Wight.
The Saxons had been merchants of genocide, and in the years before Alfred was born they got their comeuppance. Some say the raiders were driven by a population boom in Denmark, where the habit of polygamy had produced many younger sons of second wives, all casting envious eyes on the sheepfolds of England. Whatever the reasons, the Vikings came to Britain, sailing up the rivers in their sneaky, flat-bottomed craft and disembarking with hideous ululations.
Captured Saxon kings suffered the rite
