For roughly six hundred years, London was described, celebrated, and physically built upon as a Trojan city, believed in as one by men writing in their own hand, in their own century, with no reason to expect anyone would still be reading them today.
c. 828–830. The claim’s first written trace appears in the Historia Brittonum, a brief, unadorned line naming Brutus among Britain’s founders. No embellishment yet, only the assertion.
1136–1139. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae gives the story its full shape: Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas, crossing the known world after Troy’s fall to found a city on the Thames he names Troia Nova, New Troy.
c. 1173–1174. William FitzStephen, a Londoner who had served on Thomas Becket’s own staff, opens his biography of the murdered archbishop not with Becket at all, but with a description of London itself, twelve pages of it, reaching for Virgil and Horace to make his case. He writes plainly: “London is, on the faith of the chroniclers, a much older city than Rome, for by the same Trojan forefathers this was founded by Brutus before that by Romulus and Remus.” This is the moment the legend stops being royal genealogy and becomes civic pride, a city measuring its own worth against Rome’s and coming out ahead.
1412–1420. John Lydgate, commissioned by the future Henry V to prove English capable of the grand classical themes usually reserved for Latin and French, writes his vast Troy Book, retelling Troy’s founding and fall for an English audience already primed to see their own capital in the story.
c. 1501. William Dunbar, in his poem London, thou art the flour of Cities all, addresses the city directly by its old name: “Gladdith anon, thou lusty Troynovaunt, / Citie that some tyme cleped was New Troy… / Strong Troy in vigour and in strenuytie.” The refrain, repeated through every stanza, still calls London the flower of all cities, in the same breath as Troy.
16th century. A statue of King Lud, the legendary ruler said to have rebuilt and renamed the city after himself, is erected at the gate that still carries his name. The gate itself was demolished in 1760, and nothing of it stands today. The name survives in Ludgate Hill, the rise leading up to St Paul’s Cathedral, and a short walk away, on Fleet Street, worn statues of King Lud and his two sons still stand in the porch of St Dunstan-in-the-West, moved there when the gate came down. Even the move itself carried an odd footnote: when the statues arrived, the spot intended for them was already occupied by a statue of Elizabeth I, and there was no room for four monarchs where three would fit. Elizabeth stayed. Lud and his sons were found space elsewhere in the same porch.
William Purdie Treloar, who later became Lord Mayor of London himself, assessed the whole legend with exactly the caution this piece has tried to hold throughout, in his 1892 history of the street: “All that we can really yield to the memory of King Lud is that he probably was a person of some importance in his day, and he may have given his name to a town; but Lud Town is almost as visionary as Troynovant when we seek in it the derivation of London; and the oldest Lud Gate of which there is any authentic record, was no older than the reign of King John.” A serving civic official of London, in other words, writing at the height of the city’s imperial confidence, found the evidence for its own founding legend no stronger than we have.
1577. Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles prints the story as settled fact, in careful chronological detail: “Brutus… built this city near unto the river now called Thames, and named it Troynovant.”
1586. William Camden, an Englishman working from genuine antiquarian method rather than inherited legend, begins the real scholarly turn against the story in his Britannia, examining the claims his predecessors had simply repeated.
1590. Edmund Spenser gives the legend its most famous line of poetry, in The Faerie Queene: “For noble Britons sprong from Trojans bold, / And Troynovant was built of old Troy’s ashes cold.”
1604. A year after the union of the English and Scottish crowns, James I makes his formal royal entry into London. Although no surviving inscription from the arch itself has been found, the pageant is recorded as presenting James as emperor of a restored Great Britain, with London as its capital, the New Troy, and James himself as a second Brutus, come again to rule the kingdom his namesake first founded. The framing does not sit well with everyone present. To Scots watching the pageant, Brutus had always symbolised English dominance, not a heritage shared equally between the two crowns, and the tension shows in how the union was received.
Well into the 17th century, the name and the story remain current enough to shape civic pageantry, poetry, and popular memory, long after Camden’s method had already begun quietly dismantling its claim to literal history.
1703. The name has become common enough currency to work as political satire. The Tryal, Examination, and Condemnation of Occasional Conformity, a pamphlet mocking the fierce contemporary row over Dissenters occasionally taking Anglican communion to qualify for public office, stages its mock trial at “a Sessions of Oyer and Terminer, held at Troynovant, before Mr. Justice Upright and Mr. Baron Integrity.” Nobody writing or reading this needed an explanation of what Troynovant meant. Well over a century after Camden’s antiquarian method had begun the real scholarly dismantling of the story, the name itself was still sharp enough, and common enough, to land a political joke.
That is close to six hundred years, start to finish, of London being written, sung, and processed through the streets as Troy reborn, by men who had access to sources now lost, working in a period when the story was neither exotic nor especially contested. Whatever is eventually decided about how much of it was ever literally true, the fact that it was believed, performed, and built into the city’s own sense of itself for six centuries is not in question. That part is simply what the record says.
This piece stands alongside Cornwall of Troy in Trojans Bold, Tartaria Britannica’s ongoing series on Britain’s Trojan legend.
July 2026
The stage is different now, and the reason for building it was nothing more than a film opening. But the horse still gets built, still gets brought into the city, still draws a crowd to stand and look at it, six hundred years after anyone needed to believe a word of the story for it to work. One wonders what Cassandra would make of it, watching from wherever she watches now, as the horse comes through the gates of the city again, and no one runs.
