ANNALS

OF

S. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL.

CHAPTER I.

S. PAUL'S, UNDER THE ROMANS AND THE SAXONS.

THE CATHEDRAL of S. PAUL stands on a site which might seem designated and predestined for Divine worship. Almost all, if not all, heathen religions affect high places for the temples of their gods. If, then, there was indeed a British city where London now stands, we might not unreasonably suppose that this spacious and commanding eminence might have been chosen for the celebration of the barbarous religious rites. If any faith could be placed in Druidism, as described by the Roman writers, and embellished by later poetry, we might lead forth the whiterobed priests in their long procession, with their attendant bards, their glittering harps and sounding hymns, from the oak-clad heights to the north of London, to offer their sacrifices-bloody human sacrifices-or more innocent oblations of the fruits of the earth-on that hill-top, from which anthems have so long risen to the Redeemer of mankind.

But Geoffrey of Monmouth's great Trinobantine city, the 'Troy-novant' of later romance, has long vanished into thin air; and London, more modest, must content itself

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with the fame of being an early and rapidly flourishing colony of our Roman conquerors. It cannot justly aspire to an earlier date than the reign of Claudius; and for that date we have the weighty authority of Tacitus.'

There seems evidence, not to be contested, that on this eminence was a Roman prætorian camp to defend and to command the rising city below. That a Roman temple should stand beside, or in the neighbourhood of, the strong military position, is no great demand on our belief. In height and strength no eminence, in what was then London, could compare with the spacious esplanade on which S. Paul's stands. The imagination may find it difficult, but may succeed in clearing-if it may be so saidand exposing its commanding elevation, as it rose in those distant days, when it looked down on the broad and clear, and yet unbridged Thames, ebbing and flowing at its feet, and, deep below to the west, the narrower, and then, no doubt, pellucid Fleet. This smaller rivulet, having

welled forth from the dense forests which covered the hills to the north of London, and having wound its quiet course through the lower level, expanded into a navigable stream before it fell into the Thames. Ill-fated stream! which, having gradually sunk to the ignominious name of Fleet Ditch, became proverbial for its filth and foetid odours; and in its last days, before it was closed for ever, was darkly immortalised by Pope, who plunged his Dunces into its foul waters, to rise again in majesty of mud.' At length, as it were for very shame, the Fleet was hidden out of sight, and degraded to a dark and inefficient sewer.

I.

So soon as Christianity attained to strength and as- CHAP. cendancy in the Roman world, it would find its way into the provinces, even to the most remote, in all likelihood noiselessly and without observation.' Sober history has long dismissed the fable of Joseph of Arimathea, even of S. Paul, preaching in Britain. The Apostle, in the time of the Emperor Nero, would have found only a fierce and as yet doubtful conflict between the Roman legions and the yet barbarous and hardly broken tribes, with Boadicea at their head. King Lucius and the missionaries of his Court have likewise quietly withdrawn into the dim region of Christian mythology. In truth, of the first introduction of Christianity into Roman Britain, nothing is historically known. Yet, as soon as there were Christian churches,' there can be no doubt that there would be a church in London; and that such church might be within the precincts of the great military fortress, is by no means improbable. I must not pass over the legend, unearthed by Dugdale from an obscure monkish chronicler, that, during the persecution by Diocletian, the church on the site of S. Paul's was demolished, and a temple to Diana built on its ruins; while at Thorney (Westminster) rose a kindred shrine to Apollo; the heathen deities supplanting S. Peter and S. Paul. This myth, however, must, at least in its larger part, follow the fictions of those, or rather of succeeding, ages. But of Diana more below. The Diocletian, or rather Galerian, persecution raged chiefly in the East, and in the West at Rome. Remote Britain, under the doubtfully faithful government of Constantius, the father of Constantine, can hardly have been much disturbed. At all events, the persecution lasted far too short a time for the destruction of churches, and the building of heathen temples in their 2 Ellis's Dugdale, p. 3.

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place. Of all this, the Roman temples and Christian churches, the authority, it must be acknowledged, is altogether vague and obscure, and so they may pass into oblivion.

One singular fact, however, seems to rest on stronger evidence. No doubt on part of this area of S. Paul's there was a very ancient cemetery, in which not only successive generations, but successive races, deposited the remains of their dead. A cemetery, however, by no means implied a place of divine worship. With the Romans rather the contrary. By the laws of the Twelve Tables, and by immemorial and unbroken usage, the interment of the dead within the walls of a city was inexorably interdicted. The urns of the great, after the practice of burning the dead prevailed, were alike banished beyond the pomœrium. These laws and usages, no doubt, were enforced in all cities throughout the Roman empire. Till the days of dominant Christianity, when, in its more material form differing from the sublime spiritualism of S. Paul, it gave an inalienable sanctity to the buried body, interment within a city, still less within a church, was unknown. Constantine was the first who broke through that law, and ordered his remains to repose in the Church of the Apostles.

In the camp, in as close conformity as possible with this usage, the dead were buried in the vallum, the enclosing trench, beyond the actual precincts of the camp, yet secure from hostile violation. That there was a catacomb excavated beneath, or on the declivity of, the hill of S. Paul's, if not within the very outskirts of the Prætorium, there can be no doubt; and that this catacomb contained the remains of successive masters and inhabitants of London. Upon digging the foundation of the fabric of

The martyrdom of S. Alban (be it observed, a soldier, and the persecution chiefly assailed the soldiery) is

the only tradition which can aspire to historical credibility.-See Latin Christianity, vol. ii. p. 226.