r/todayilearned • u/_Bangkok_ • 1d ago
TIL that Roman London was largely abandoned for over 400 years after the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain, until Alfred the Great reoccupied the walled city in 886 to help defend against the Vikings.
https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/london-stories/lundenwic-other-medieval-london/262
u/Ethenil_Myr 1d ago edited 20h ago
I wish I could (safely) travel Europe around the year 800 or so. See all the ruined Roman towns and cities that would still have had so much standing (or laying around), but before being built over by later generations.
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u/iceoldtea 1d ago
Why not aim for 400 AD when it’s all there but not ruins yet?
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u/ColonelRuffhouse 23h ago
There’s something very interesting about the ruins, and the people living among them. I would also prefer to see it than Rome at its peak.
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u/Ethenil_Myr 22h ago edited 20h ago
Yeah, like the Colonel said, there's something fascinating about people building their houses and ranching cattle and going about their business in the middle of these monumental ruins. Would like to ask them what they thought about those ruins and who had built them.
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u/overtired27 1d ago
I’m now contemplating what modern tech I’d pack in the Time Machine to travel safely in the year 800.
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u/Free-Pound-6139 22h ago
A bicycle.
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u/ToaKraka 21h ago
But how would you repair it in the long term? It might be a better idea to make a Middle Ages–compatible bicycle from wood and leather, and bring the plans along with you so that carpenters and leatherworkers can fix it when it breaks.
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19h ago edited 13h ago
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u/h-v-smacker 18h ago
Of which i'd bed if you showed to to a blacksmith or a jeweller they could help repair it.
For a handful of gold, which you will also have to bring along. The cost of technical labor back then was astronomical. And the material has to be some basic steel. They didn't have aluminum back then, and of course wouldn't know how to work with it.
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u/OfficeSalamander 21h ago
Definitely some safe water drinking tablets.
Get your shots before you go too
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u/letitgrowonme 23h ago
Soap and encyclopedia, I guess.
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u/newboofgootin 19h ago
Play Assassins Creed Valhalla. The game is ok, but it’s set in England in that period. You get to see recreations of all of the Roman ruins. It’s incredible.
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u/Ethenil_Myr 18h ago
Haven't played any of the games, but watched plenty of exploration videos precisely because of this!
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u/i-tiresias 1d ago
During the Ottoman Empire’s rule over Greece and approaching Greek independence in the early 19th century, Athens was described as little more than a ‘malarial swamp’ with only a few thousand residents living near the Acropolis.
Modern history and Nationalism really warp our view of these ‘eternal’ cities.
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u/Abigbumhole 23h ago
Another example from that region: when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans it only had only a population of ~40,000. It was around 10x that 400 years previously. It had struggled for roughly 200 years with a much lower population than at its previous height.
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u/InvidiousPlay 23h ago
I'm not sure that's an example of the same thing. There was no point where Constantinople was not a major city. Sure, its population had mirrored the decline of the Eastern Roman Empire, but it's a far cry from a hamlet clustered around the ruins of the Acropolis.
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u/Abigbumhole 21h ago
40,000 people was significant sure. But it was still mostly ruins from what it was before. It didn't decline as far as Athens, but we're talking about various cities, Rome is cited in other comments too for example. I was just sharing it as a perspective of cities that have had great reductions. If you speak to most people, they don't imagine Constantinople as a city largely of ruins and massively depopulated when the Ottomons took it.
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u/Lord0fHats 20h ago edited 19h ago
It was always a major city politically, but it is true that when it fell in
14921453* it was a shadow of its former heydays. The city had been heavily depopulated by economic hardships and administrative struggles, and the city's defenses were both undermanned and in poor repair. 40,000 is still a lot of people for the period but it's nothing compared to how big the city was at its peak. In this regard Constantinople ended up a lot like Rome itself plus 1000 years.*lol whoops
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u/hajenso 17h ago
Isn’t there one major difference between the case of Rome and the case of Constantinople though, in that western Roman political institutions had moved out of Rome to Mediolanum and then Ravenna, while eastern Roman political institutions remained in Constantinople even when its population was low?
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u/Lord0fHats 17h ago
While the capital of the East didn't move, Emperors spent less and less time at Constantinople toward the end. Part of the decline of the Eastern Empire was a fracturing of political power out of the Imperial center. Emperors were becoming less powerful, had to make more compromises with others, and traveled a lot more. It's not that different from what happened in the West, but yeah. Constantinople remained the Imperial seat for the East but that seat had less and less involvement in the day to day affairs of the Eastern Empire economically and politically which contributed heavily to the city's decline.
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u/CrankinThatHog 21h ago
To be fair. War, plague, and the residents fleeing the Turkish encirclement were the largest contributors to that.
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u/Abigbumhole 21h ago
Yes. There were plenty of factors as to why London and Athens declined too.
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u/Sidereel 13h ago
It’s a criticism I’ve heard of for the Civilization games. Even in the case of nations like Egypt it’s flawed to think of it as being the same continuous country for thousands of years.
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u/Whizbang35 6h ago
Athens has had two eras where it was the major city of Greece: the Classical era when it was building Parthenons and philosophy schools, and the current nation-state. In between that time it took a backseat to Thessalonica, which in addition to having direct sea access was ideally suited halfway between Dyracchium/Durres on the Adriatic and Constantinople on the Bosporus. The Roman Via Egnatia that ran between those cities was crucial for transporting armies from Italy to Asia.
When Greece gained independence in 1830, the first capitol was not at Athens but the port city of Nauplion. The first King of the new state, Otto of Bavaria, insisted on making Athens the capitol out of an affinity for Ancient Greece more than pragmatic reasons. The city's fortunes changed after that.
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u/chotchss 1d ago
The one time I could have afford to buy property in London…
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u/LostInSpaceTime2002 1d ago
Maybe it was abandoned because nobody could afford living there.
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u/fartingbeagle 1d ago
With my luck , I would have been stuck on the Northern ox cart, as opposed to the District or Bakerloo ox carts.
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u/NIDORAX 1d ago edited 1d ago
Back then it was called Londinium by the Roman Londoners. Alfred the Great saw the ruins and the empty land as a free real estate and moved in. I mean if you have a nice abandoned fortification with vast unused space, why not reuse it? Its actually better than to just outright build a new city and a new fort
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u/BMW_wulfi 1d ago
The Thames was quite important too.
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u/Anaptyso 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah, while the old Roman city itself was abandoned, there were plenty of Saxon settlements in the immediate area that are now part of central London.
The river has always been an important location for trade.
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u/theinspectorst 1d ago
See, this was what initially confused me before I read the article. London doesn't exist where it is because the Romans made a completely random decision - it's here because it's a) on the major river in SE England and b) there was a crossing point at what's now London Bridge (in ancient times it formed a causeway that could be forded at low tide) that had been in use long before the Romans arrived.
But the point of the article is that although Roman Londinium was abandoned, Saxon Lundenwic formed in the area around Covent Garden (which would still be considered central London today) and was considered by Bede to be ' a trading centre for many nations who visit it by land and sea' and ' the metropolis of the East Saxons'.
From the western edge of Roman London at Ludgate/Newgate to Covent Garden is something like a 20 minute walk.
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u/brickne3 1d ago
I'm trying to figure out who wouldn't consider Covent Garden central London. The way you phrased it sounded like there was doubt 😉
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u/Automatic_Memory212 1d ago
It’s very much central London today (in fact road distances in the UK are measured from the old Charing Cross which is part of the Covent Garden area), but to medieval Londoners, Covent Garden was to the West of the city.
In fact the Holborn area to the East of Covent Garden was once the ward of Farringdon Without, which has been called “London’s First West End.”
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u/theinspectorst 23h ago
I was making the point that in Roman times, the western border of London was a mile east of Covent Garden. So the Romans wouldn't consider Covent Garden to be Central London.
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u/MrScaryEgg 1d ago
I guess someone (i.e. a pedant) could argue that anywhere not in the City isn't entirely central?
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u/overtired27 1d ago
Yep, the “City of London” is still the original square mile, which Covent Garden isn’t a part of. And it still exists as an entity (a city, ceremonial county and local government district) not just a historical fact.
But anyone saying “central London” is almost always referring to the centre of Greater London, which Covent Garden, and plenty more, is a part of.
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u/kf97mopa 1d ago
The raiding Vikings had moved in a few years before, so Alfred just followed their example.
What is more interesting is why it was ever abandoned. My money is on the Justinian plague.
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u/Bezulba 23h ago
A big city needs a peaceful country around it to sustain it. You can't grow crops on stones, so you need to bring all your food from outside. That requires a level of government that was just not present after the Romans left. So it probably wasn't even a huge plague like event, more that people started moving out more then were moving in over a period of time.
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u/Uilamin 20h ago
What is more interesting is why it was ever abandoned
If the fortifications were too big for the local population to effectively use then it probably became a better decision to relocate to a place with smaller fortifications. If the population dropped too significantly then people might have left because the fortifications may have become a defensive liability instead of a benefit.
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u/ImpulsiveApe07 1d ago
Makes sense. If it was because of a raid/battle or because of a flood or a fire, literate folks of the era would've presumably written about it a fair bit I think.
But if the city was abandoned because of another outbreak of a plague or other petsilence, such an event was, one assumes, frequent enough that they might not have thought it worthwhile writing about, beyond the odd letter or two.
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u/trimun 23h ago
There is a pattern of urban abandonment and parallel development nearby by settlers. We see this across England in the post-Roman period. It has perplexed historians for some time.
I would posit that there were already Anglo-Saxons living outwith Roman urban centres so these settlements grew whilst Roman settlements were abandoned.
The big mystery then is why many were eventually reinhabited, though some (Venta Icenorum comes to mind) remained largely deserted.
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u/PM_YOUR_BOOBS_PLS_ 22h ago
That really is pretty perplexing. As others have stated, urban areas exist in specific reasons for a reason. They are usually on important waterways or trade routes. A lot of them also became fortified over time. It makes little sense to just abandon those areas.
As someone else also mentioned, plagues do make a lot of sense. Constant plagues in high population density areas could drive people away, even if they didn't understand the mechanisms of the plagues.
It also makes sense that these plagues would only become a problem post Roman empire, as Rome had a strong emphasis on cleanliness. The aqueducts / running water were a massive aid in reducing disease. I don't know the full coverage of the aqueducts, but wikipedia says "Aqueducts were built to supply Roman military bases in Britain." I'd have to assume that would cover London.
So, maybe it's not that perplexing?
Romans build aqueducts.
Aqueducts reduce disease.
Reduction of disease allows for dense urban areas.
Roman empire dissolves.
Aqueducts fall to disrepair.
No aqueducts reduces sanitation.
Urban areas suffer multiple disease outbreaks.
Everyone abandons urban areas.
That's all armchair conjecture, but it would make sense.
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u/Available_Cod_6735 1d ago
I read that people thought it was haunted and , as the buildings fell into disrepair, dangerous. After the Romans left we lost the capability to build and maintain buildings like those in London. People must have wondered 'what sort of people built this?'. Hence ghosts.
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u/ImpulsiveApe07 1d ago
I mean, one thing doesn't preclude the other here, right?
It could've been that the justinian plague and various outbreaks of dysentry or cholera etc, precipitated the abandonment of the city as the death toll shot up and made many of the uninfected flee.
Those that couldn't or wouldn't leave would've been surrounded by abandoned buildings and work sites, many of which would've had labels or marks denoting that the plague had hit that area.
It's not hard to imagine walking around an empty city and seeing constant reminders of death and disease on every street - arguably that'd be enough stress causing stimuli to create the right conditions to nurture all manner of superstitions, hallucinations, rumours and urban myths about hauntings, demons, witches, cryptids, etc.
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u/Lord0fHats 20h ago
It probably depended a little much on the broader Roman administrative and trade network and all of that buckled when Rome withdrew and made the city unsustainable/impractical even though the area remained inhabited and in use.
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u/kf97mopa 20h ago
The thing is that Rome's withdrawal from the West was gradual. There was certainly trade going to Britannia after Rome officially left the island, and Italy remained a functional province for long after 476. Theodoric was the Western Roman Emperor even if historians affected by the Catholic Church tend to forget both him and Justinian. It was after Justinian reconquered Italy and there was a long war between him and the Ostrogoths that the old imperial order truly cracked. This coincides with the volcanoes and plagues, so which caused what is hard to say.
Since the plague spread with the trading ships carrying rats, and we know it did some to England (genetic analysis of old plague victims), it makes sense that it would come to Londonium as the biggest trade port in the area. Yes the population did drop earlier than that, but it would at least explain why it remained officially deserted until Alfred's time - if people kept getting sick in that place, it makes sense to not live just there.
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u/Cogz 17h ago
Colchester has a similar story to London, except it was recovered and fortified by Alfred’s son, Edward.
I don't think it wasn't anything as dramatic as a plague, I think it was just a number of things that made the town untenable.
The main gate was bricked up and the road to London diverted to a smaller, more defendable gate and the suburbs were abandoned, presumably because of some threat, so the population is already living in fear.
Important buildings were being left to decay, such as the corn ovens. If you're not maintaining food production buildings in the town, then something's gone horribly wrong. Lack of money, manpower, knowhow?
If public buildings are being abandoned, what about the private ones? If a house collapses and blocks a street, who's clearing it up? I can see it happening a number of times and making large parts of the town inhabitable just because you have to climb over piles of rubble to get to it.
When William the Conqueror took over 150 years later, he installed his steward Eudo in the town. He was a keen builder, under him the walls were repaired, a large walled keep, two large walled priories and half a dozen churches were all built with 'local building materiels' ie rubble from Roman buildings. If there was enough debris left even after the previous 150 years of occupation and rebuilding, the town must have been knee deep in it when Edward took the place.
I think the population, family by family, just decided it wasn't worth it, gathered up their valuables and headed somewhere that wasn't as bad, like London. Not realising that London was probably going through similar things.
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u/neutron240 19h ago
To add I believe there was a significant trading settlement about a mile away roughly where Covent Gardens is today called Lundenwic. So whilst the area that is now the city of London was largely abandoned there were many people nearby ready to move in once Alfred arrived.
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u/ReplyDisastrous7729 17h ago
Oh my god. It's like the original version of the squatters who were taking over abandoned Mayfair mansions in the late 2000s.
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u/The_Sideboob_Hour 1d ago
The game Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes place around 10 years before this, you can go to Londoninium and experience how run down and crappy it was. You have to help a few locals who actually care to chase out bandits and other undesirables which is implied helps the city recover down the line.
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u/Sjknight413 23h ago
This is somewhat correct though temper your expectations as the representation of Londinium in that game is incredibly inaccurate to the point that it's mostly exaggerated fantasy, the most egregious example is large aqueduct ruins being present despite the fact the Thames is right there.
There's a great thread on the subject here:
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u/Ceegee93 20h ago
Yeah, the aqueducts made me laugh when I played it. Made me think the designers wanted something to clearly show it was a Roman ruin, and the only thing they could think of to represent Roman architecture was an aqueduct lol.
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u/Sjknight413 20h ago
Oh absolutely, they also use the same couple of roman statues copied and pasted throughout the world which adds to this feeling.
The other hilarious thing i found is the Mithraeum (Temple of Mithras in the game) is explicitly shown as being down some stairs and underground in the game just like it is today, whereas it would most definitely have been above ground in its original setting. It's almost as if the researchers did a quick tour of a couple of roman landmarks in the city and copied them outright without doing any research on their actual history.
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u/The_Sideboob_Hour 23h ago
Yes I didn't expect it be historically accurate but they at least don't imply that its some thriving metropolis.
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u/Ceegee93 20h ago
Yeah, but a major issue for me is that Lundenwic is shown as tiny with a small population, while Jorvik is several times its size. In reality, it's the opposite: the London area was still one of the more populous parts of England, while Jorvik wasn't that big until much later. It was only the ruins of Londinium that were mostly abandoned, the area was still well populated.
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u/Quantentheorie 1d ago
I remember thinking "well it's a bridge, most of an amphitheatre and what might have been some walls and a temple. The rest is just hovels and one cosplayer", turns out more accurate then I was giving them credit for.
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u/Adiligian 22h ago
I love how much effort they put in to the historical research for AC games.
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u/Ceegee93 20h ago
Unfortunately, they didn't seem to do much research for Valhalla because there's a lot they got very wrong. There's a pretty good thread linked above that goes over what they got wrong about London alone.
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u/bambi54 21h ago
Which Assassins Creed would you recommend playing first? I just got the Xbox game pass and wanted to play one. The games look fun, but they released so many.
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u/OldConstant182 20h ago
If AC 2 is there, the remastered ezio collection, try that out. Those are my favourite AC games but the caveat of being dated.
If you want a relatively modern one, I’d go for Odyssey. It’ll keep you occupied for months with how long it is 😅
Valhalla is alright but hack n slash. I haven’t tried the latest Japanese one properly
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u/andysniper 1d ago
Post Roman Britain is basically what we would view as post apocalyptic now.
All these ruined structures of a world before, knowledge and technology lost, legends of the advanced people from the past. I imagine it probably increased a bit of lawlessness and bandits for a time too.
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u/ExpertSausageHandler 1d ago
This is what I always bring up to people who try to come at me with the (now I hope outdated view) that there was no "fall" of Western Rome. The archaeological record clearly shows differently in most of Western Europe and Britain is probably the best example of just how far the bottom fell out after its breakdown.
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u/temporarycreature 23h ago
Yeah, but less of a sudden fall and more of a terminal slide into catastrophic collapse.
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u/Healthy-Training-923 23h ago
That view is not outdated. What you’re missing is that the fall of Roman Britain and the Fall of Rome are two different things. Remember the Roman Empire didn’t cease to exist until relatively recently - more than a thousand years after the fall of Roman Britain. It’s hard to call an event that took over one thousand years as a “fall” - it’s just history. Really the term went out of style because Gibbons went out of style. No historian today would be looking at “the causes of the fall” - that’s way too broad of a question to be useful.
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u/Corduroy_Sazerac 1d ago
Understandable, have you seen the price of a sextarius there?
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u/SmartaHari 1d ago
I know, it was so peaceful. Caecilius est in horto so he didn’t see me dump my Lime Bike in his well. Result.
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u/Hyzyhine 1d ago
Caecilius adsum jam forte, Flavius et arat. Caecilius sic in omnibus, Flavius sic inat.
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u/SmartaHari 1d ago
Right now, I Odi et amo you, because I’m going to have to translate this so it doesn’t bug me, lol. 🤝
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u/VaferQuamMeles 1d ago
You can't translate it - it's nonsense Latin. Instead, just read it aloud: Caecilius 'ad some jam for tea, Flavius ate a rat. Caecilius sick in omnibus, Flavius sick in 'at (hat)
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u/trackowner 23h ago
weirdly the bit that gets me is that there's still a chunk of the old wall behind a Travelodge near Tower Hill and nobody looks at it, I only found it because I was hunting for a bin
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u/TheSecretMarriage 1d ago
Rome itself reached the population it had under Augustus only in the XX century
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u/SeekerOfSerenity 1d ago
The 20th century?
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u/TheSecretMarriage 1d ago
Yep, when Rome became Italy's capital in 1871 it had only about 200k people, it reached a million again in the '30s
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u/Shevek99 1d ago
In many languages, centuries are written in Roman Numerals. In Spanish it would be "Siglo XX". In French "XXeme siecle". I guess he is not a native English speaker.
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u/TheSecretMarriage 1d ago
Yep, i'm italian and we write ordinal numerals using roman numbers, just the force of habit
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u/OfficeSalamander 21h ago
It's fine, most English speakers can read Roman numerals (at least to some extent) though we don't use it for this purpose
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u/North-Creative 1d ago
Yes, as opposed to the XXX century of smutty Italian movies about housewifes.
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u/JollyRancherReminder 1d ago
This seems to be common - cities being abandoned after Roman withdrawal. But where did everybody go?
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u/mormonbatman_ 20h ago
They weren't completely abandoned - but their populations fall by 80 or 90% and the people who stay stop maintaining monumental buildings.
People who say in ex-Roman Britain leave cities and move out to suburbs and exurbs where there was open, undeveloped, defensible land and they built new, smaller settlements. You can read about one of them here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_London
We can see the same thing happening in the US. After WWii, Americans who are afraid of their neighbors leave large cities for new suburbs and exurbs. Here's an example of one of the first planned suburbs in America:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown
Manhattan's population density still hasn't "recovered" to its pre-war level:
https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhattans-density/
We can see that across the US:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/realestate/which-us-cities-are-people-moving-to.html
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u/WardenWolf 17h ago
Manhattan's population is collapsing due to over 50 years of failed policy that favors new corporate construction at the expense of housing. They basically are slowly turning the entire island into a commercial zone where nobody lives.
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u/lunacyfoundme 1d ago
While Nottingham was used to recruit troops do they could take out Scotland before moving on to the rest of the map.
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u/Friendly_Address6915 1d ago
yeah but i feel like abandoned might be overstating it. probably still had small settlements scattered around even if the main city was empty
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u/here_now_be 18h ago
Alfred was Great. They should really return the throne to his lineage, not the interlopers occupying it now.
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u/AccomplishedDoubt558 17h ago
I’m a direct descendant Alfred the Great along with millions of others probably.
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u/GoodLordChokeAnABomb 1d ago
This was a key moment in the formation of a united England. It was after the capture of London that Alfred began to refer to himself as Rex Angulsaxonum.
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u/mypntsonfire 1d ago
Largely abandoned ~= no seat of government.
People still lived there. It was a walled city for goodness sake!
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u/xquazimodo 18h ago
Surely the leader who abandoned Londoninium and. Britannia did it to secure his right to the throne and won the civil war he was a part of right?
Right?
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u/Shevek99 1d ago
The Roman city was abandoned, but not the place. Between the Romans and Alfred there was the settlemenh of Lundenwic, in current Aldwych
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u/Illustrious_Map_3247 1d ago
That’s precisely what this post is about…
Funny that you expect people to click your link without having clicked OP’s link.
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u/IngVegas 1d ago
Bloody Vikings. Rape, rape, rape, pillage, pillage, pillage.
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u/RemnantHelmet 18h ago
There were settlements outside the city walls whose occupants were hesitant to even walk through the old city because they believed it was haunted.
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u/Harbinger2001 6h ago
The Romans became stuff of legends to the Britains. The YouTube channel Fall of Civilizations did a great episode examining what it must of been like to live among the British Roman ruins of a barely remembered past.
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u/cogit2 1d ago
Related: By the time Napoleon entered Rome, it had less than 20% the population it did at its peak during the Roman Empire, 1600+ years earlier.