Roman Londinium refounded by Alfred: England's largest and richest medieval city, where William the Conqueror built the Tower, the citizens won a commune and a mayor, and the rebels of 1381 fought their way in.
London sits where the Thames could first be bridged, far enough inland to be safe from raiders and still within reach of sea-going ships. The Romans built Londinium on that spot, and in the Middle Ages the city inside the old Roman walls became by far the largest town in England and its commercial capital, while two miles upstream the abbey and palace of Westminster became the seat of the crown.
That separation shaped medieval London. The City was a self-governing community of merchants with its own mayor, courts and liberties, rich enough that kings borrowed from it and dangerous enough that they built the Tower to overawe it. Its population reached perhaps 80,000 before the Black Death of 1348–1349 killed a third or more of its people.
Roman Londinium was largely abandoned in the fifth century. When trade revived in the seventh, the Anglo-Saxon town of Lundenwic grew up outside the walls along the Strand, a beach market for ships from Frisia and Francia, and Bede described London as a market of many peoples coming by land and sea. The Vikings attacked it repeatedly in the ninth century, and a Danish army wintered there in 871–872.
In 886 Alfred the Great occupied London and moved its people back inside the Roman walls, refounding it as a fortified burh, Lundenburh, and entrusting it to his son-in-law Æthelred, lord of the Mercians. Parts of the City's street pattern still follow that planned town. London beat off repeated Danish attacks in the reign of Æthelred the Unready, and it was the last great English town to accept Cnut the Great as king in 1016.
William the Conqueror did not storm London after the Battle of Hastings; he cut it off until its leaders submitted at Berkhamsted, was crowned at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066, and granted the citizens a short writ confirming their laws that survives in the city's archives. He also began three castles to hold them down. The greatest, the White Tower, rose from about 1078 in the south-east corner of the Roman wall.
The citizens won self-government by exploiting royal quarrels. They backed Stephen of England against the Empress Matilda, whom they drove out in 1141 as she prepared for her coronation. In 1191, with Richard the Lionheart away on crusade, Prince John recognised the commune of London, and within a few years the city had its first mayor, Henry fitz Ailwin. When John broke with his barons, London opened its gates to the rebels in May 1215, and Magna Carta confirmed the city's ancient liberties and customs.
Old London Bridge, built in stone between 1176 and 1209 with houses along it and a chapel on its central pier dedicated to Thomas Becket, himself a Londoner, was one of the sights of Europe. Edward I used the city for political theatre: after William Wallace was executed at Smithfield in 1305, his head was set on the bridge.
London's wealth came from wool and cloth. English wool left through its quays for Flanders and Italy, wine arrived from Gascony, and the merchants of the Hanseatic League kept their own walled enclave, the Steelyard, on the riverbank just upstream of London Bridge, with trading privileges Londoners bitterly resented. The livery companies of mercers, grocers, drapers, fishmongers and goldsmiths regulated their trades, chose the city's officers and built halls across the City.
Richard Whittington, a mercer who was mayor four times between 1397 and 1420, is the best-documented example of that world: he lent money to three kings, and his bequests rebuilt Newgate prison and founded almshouses. London also dominated English law and letters as no other town did. The Inns of Court trained the common lawyers, and in 1476 William Caxton set up England's first printing press at Westminster.
In June 1381 the rebels of the Peasants' Revolt entered London, burned John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace, broke into the Tower and beheaded the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury. At Smithfield on 15 June the mayor, William Walworth, struck down the rebel leader Wat Tyler in front of the fourteen-year-old Richard II of England, who rode forward and persuaded the crowd to disperse.
London's loyalty was the prize of every fifteenth-century crisis. Jack Cade's Kentish rebels held the city briefly in July 1450 until the citizens fought them on London Bridge, and Edward IV was proclaimed king there in March 1461. The city had also housed the war's most valuable prisoner: John II of France lived in the rebuilt Savoy after his capture in 1356, and he returned to London to die there in 1364.
Medieval London lay almost entirely within its walls, about 330 acres between the Tower and the Fleet river, entered by seven gates and served by more than a hundred parish churches. Old St Paul's, rebuilt after a fire in 1087, crowned Ludgate Hill with one of the tallest spires in Europe; Cheapside was the main market street; and the only bridge across the Thames led to Southwark, where the bishops of Winchester kept their palace and the inns and brothels lay outside the City's jurisdiction.
The best description of the twelfth-century city comes from William Fitzstephen, a clerk of Thomas Becket, who around 1173 praised its schools, its cookshops on the riverbank, its horse fair at Smithfield and the young men who skated on the frozen marsh of Moorfields with bones tied to their feet.