CHAPTER 43

Head of the River

There is a curious connection between the Thames and severed heads. Of course the heads paraded on London Bridge are the most obvious tokens of this association, but they are a relatively late manifestation of an ancient phenomenon. Heads were deposited in the river from the earliest times. Recent research confirms that almost three hundred skulls have been discovered in the river itself, dating from the Neolithic to the Iron Ages, and that they had been placed there in a “defleshed” condition. This would mean that the flesh was physically scraped from them or, more likely, that they were left to rot until the flesh had fallen away. Only fourteen of them included the mandible. But these are only the documented remnant of what seems to have been wholesale practice. Neolithic skulls have been found placed in pits beside the river; one such pit, at Sutton Courtenay, contained ten human skulls. In some instances the lower mandibles had been removed prior to burial. Marks on a cranium found at Staines suggest that the head was indeed severed from the body at an early stage. Recent excavations have also uncovered a number of human skulls, dating from the Bronze and Iron Ages, that were deliberately placed in riverine locations. Whether this was for the purposes of punishment or of veneration remains unclear.

From the Celtic or Early British period a large number of Roman and British skulls have been discovered in the river below Chelsea Bridge. It might be surmised that these are simply the remains of a more than usually bloody battle, but of course this does not explain why only the skulls have been recovered. It seems more likely that they were severed from the bodies before being placed in the Thames. The stretch of the river at Battersea Bridge was once known as a “Celtic Golgotha,” a place of skulls. A paper, published as early as 1857, was entitled “On the discovery of Celtic crania in the vicinity of London.” At Strand-on-the-Green, over one hundred human skulls were discovered in the late 1920s. There have been similar finds at Kew and at Hammersmith. The preponderance of the skulls dates from the late prehistoric period, and we may wish to conclude that at some point in its history the Thames was in certain respects a charnel house. The majority of these finds were made between London and Oxford, with particular concentrations in the stretch of the river between Richmond and Mortlake. This may reflect the patterns of population by the Thames, or it may be that these areas are simply the ones that have been most extensively dredged in recent years.

Ritualised heads have also been discovered in the river, perhaps the most notable being that of the emperor Hadrian that was thrown into the Thames close to London Bridge. The marble head of a woman was also found in that stretch of the Thames, and the bronze head of a girl close to the foreshore by Fish Street Hill. And then there is the phenomenon, in the waters of the Thames, of statues with their heads deliberately removed. Some small bronze figurines, for example, were found in the river without heads. Was this some form of communication with the underworld of spirits or with the deities of the river?

The significance and sacredness of the human head were undoubtedly part of ancient British ritual worship. The British believed that the soul resided in the head, rather than the heart, and it may be that in depositing the head the worshippers were also offering up the soul to the other world of which the river was an emblem. Tacitus relates that the Saxons, long before they colonised Britain, were prone to drowning their enemies in the river as sacrifices to the god Nerthus. The Celts severed the heads of both enemies and fellow countrymen for ritual purposes before, like the Saxons, dropping them into the river. It was not simply a pagan practice, however. There have been numerous finds of Christian saints’ effigies missing their heads. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as we will discover, both severed heads and headless corpses have been recovered from the waters of the Thames.

There is a story connected with this phenomenon, to be found in one of the Celtic dindshenchas, or ballads. It concerns a hero, Riach, who built a “house” or temple over a well in which he placed the severed heads of warriors killed in battle. The aura or power of these decapitated heads excited the water to such an extent that it became dangerous, and Riach was forced to erect a more steadfast structure above the well in order to contain it. It was of no avail. The waters rushed over him, and he was drowned. Here the connection is explicitly made between the severed heads of warriors, and the presence of sacred water. The water in some sense responds to the mana of the heads. Is there here some remote explanation for the ritual of depositing human skulls in the Thames? Camden believed that the name of Maidenhead was derived from the veneration of the head of a British maiden, said to have been one of the eleven thousand virgins martyred with St. Ursula on the banks of the Rhine.

There are other myths of the head, marking even closer associations with the Thames itself. The universal Celtic god, Belinus, was charged with the duty of taking the heads of the sacrificed and of transporting them to the underworld. It has already been suggested that Billingsgate, the market by the Thames, was named after Belinus. The etymology may or may not be fanciful; but it is suggestive, if Belinus was indeed considered to be one of the ancient deities of the river. Another legend of the river is equally interesting. The British giant, Bran, having been mortally wounded in a battle with the Irish, ordered that his head be carried down the Thames and placed by the river at Tower Hill as a bulwark against invasions. As the rowers progressed down the river, the severed head uttered prophecies about the island’s destiny. The ancient poems claim that King Arthur removed the head, believing that the country needed no other defender than himself. That is why London, and England, became the victim of Roman invasion. Bran also means “raven” in modern Welsh and in ancient Brythonic. So Charles II was merely reviving an ancient tradition when he placed the ravens in the Tower.

Another relatively recent discovery has confirmed the pattern of ritual killing. Towards the end of the twentieth century a collection of forty-eight human skulls was found in the Walbrook, one of the tributaries of the Thames that entered the river near Cannon Street. Ten human skulls were also found in another London tributary of the Thames, the river Lea. There are no doubt many more still to be discovered. The Walbrook heads were once believed to represent the victims of Boudicca’s invasion of London in AD 60, or perhaps the remnants of some other conflict between the Romans and the British. But the question then remains, why only the skulls? They are of young adult males and, more pertinently, they all appear to have been defleshed before being deposited in the running water. Their mandibles are also missing.

The heads on London Bridge, therefore, take their place in a long tradition. They were deposited there over a period of many centuries; sometimes they were tarred, and sometimes left in their natural state of decapitation. They were stuck upon pikes or poles, and left to rot in the sun and the rain. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the first heads are recorded, they were placed on a tower or gate on the northern side of the bridge nearest to the city. The first known instance is the head of Sir William Wallace. Then at some later date, not recorded, the site was changed to the great stone gate nearest Southwark on the south side of the river. This became known as Traitor’s Gate. A German traveller counted some thirty heads in 1598, and a map of 1597 shows them clustered together like grapes in a bunch. In fact the heads were not the only human members placed in that position. The legs and “quarters” of convicted traitors were also exhibited there, so that the gate was said to resemble a butcher’s shambles. Those engaged in this gruesome practice, however, were participating in a ritual more ancient than they could ever have imagined: they may not have been punishing the dead but, rather, offering up their souls to the Otherworld which is the Thames.