Traces of Troinovantum by Robert Shaw
Description
Traces of Troinovantum uncovers the London you were never taught about in school – a hidden city beneath the Romans, and beneath our own assumptions.
We are told that London began as a Roman trading post on an empty swamp. This book politely takes that story, turns it upside down, and shakes the coins out of its pockets. Drawing on the Museum of London’s own archaeological records, it shows there were roads, roundhouses, a monumental stone temple and massive defensive walls here long before the legions marched in 43 AD. The Romans did not build on a blank canvas – they built on top of someone else’s story.
That buried story is Troinovantum, “New Troy”, remembered in ancient British chronicles as the first great settlement on the Thames. From the Brut Tysilio to Julius Caesar’s own reports, from forgotten Celtic law codes to a vast pre-Roman cathedral on Tower Hill, Traces of Troinovantum pieces together a picture of a sophisticated, literate, stubbornly independent Britain that refused to fit Roman or later English stereotypes.
Along the way we meet Druids and charioteers who gave Caesar nightmares, rebel emperors from Britain who briefly ruled Rome, and scholars like Tolkien and Flinders Petrie who quietly preserved traces of this other history. We also look hard at why so much of it was erased: imperial propaganda, Norman class politics, and a long tradition of painting the “Celts” as colourful but clueless.
Part detective story, part historical road trip, part love letter to an older Britain still hiding in our place-names and DNA, this book invites readers to walk London’s streets with new eyes. Once you’ve seen Troinovantum flickering beneath Londinium and modern London, it is very hard to unsee it.
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