REVIEW BY KK
With additional contributions by I M Betts, Lyn Blackmore, Julian Bowsher, Jacqui Pearce, and Alan Pipe, this latest book on London by John Schofield and Stephen Freeth offers a comprehensive assessment of life on the Thames during one of London’s most bustling periods of history – before the construction of the first of the London Docks downstream of the City. Telling the story of the City’s emergence out of the ashes of the Great Fire through to its establishment as a global trading power, this study brings together the evidence from several different excavations along the Thames waterfront – from the City eastwards down to Deptford – and harmonises it with the documentary evidence.
Focusing not only on the development of maritime infrastructure during this period of rapid development, the book also illuminates the lives of the everyday people who inhabited this area: from wealthy tradesmen to enslaved African people, and everyone in between.
![Legion versus Legion The Late Republican legionary [below] was a heavily armoured, highly drilled, citizen soldier equipped with shield (scutum), javelins (pila), and short stabbing sword (gladius). The soldiers depicted on the Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus [above] are the basis for Peter Connolly’s reconstruction. Those shown on the Mainz relief [right] are somewhat later Imperial legionaries, but they are depicted wielding scutum and gladius in close quarters action in a manner that would have been familiar to Caesar’s men.](https://i0.wp.com/the-past.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/post-1_image3-16.jpg?fit=768%2C286&ssl=1)
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