Walter Besant
London

PREFACE

In the following chapters it has been my endeavor to present pictures of the City of London – instantaneous photographs, showing the streets, the buildings, and the citizens at work and at play. Above all, the citizens: with their daily life in the streets, in the shops, in the churches, and in the houses; the merchant in the quays and on 'Change; the shopkeeper of Cheapside; the priests and the monks and the friars; the shouting of those who sell; the laughter and singing of those who feast and drink; the ringing of the bells; the dragging of the criminal to the pillory; the Riding of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen; the river with its boats and barges; the cheerful sound of pipe and tabor; the stage with its tumblers and its rope-dancers; the 'prentices with their clubs; the evening dance in the streets. I want my pictures to show all these things. The history of London has been undertaken by many writers; the presentment of the city and the people from age to age has never yet, I believe, been attempted.

The sources whence one derives the materials for such an attempt are, in the earlier stages, perfectly well known and accessible to all. Chaucer, Froissart, Lydgate, certain volumes of the "Early English Text Society," occur to everybody. But the richest mine, for him who digs after the daily life of the London citizen during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is certainly Riley's great book of Extracts from the City Records. If there is any life or any reality in the three chapters of this book which treat of the Plantagenet period, it is certainly due to Riley.

As regards the Tudor period, the wealth of illustration is astonishing. One might as well be writing of the city life of this day, so copious are the materials. But it is not to Shakespeare and the dramatists that we must look for the details so much as to the minor writers, the moralists and satirists, of whom the ordinary world knows nothing.

The reign of Charles II. directs one to the Plague and to the Fire. I was fortunate in finding two tracts, one dealing with the plague of 1603, and the other with that of 1625. These, though they are earlier than Charles II., were invaluable, as illustrating the effect of the pestilence in causing an exodus of all who could get away, which took place as much in these earlier years as in 1666. Contemporary tracts on the state of London after the Fire, also happily discovered, proved useful. And when the Plague and the Fire had been dismissed, another extraordinary piece of good fortune put me in possession of certain household accounts which enabled me to present a bourgeois family of the period at home.

Where there is so much to speak about, one must exercise care in selection. I have endeavored to avoid as much as possible those points which have already been presented. For instance, the growth of the municipality, the rise of the Guilds and the Companies, the laws of London, the relations of the City to the Sovereign and the State – these things belong to the continuous historian, not to him who draws a picture of a given time. In the latter case it is the effect of law, not its growth, which is important. Thus I have spoken of the pilgrimizing in the time of Henry II.; of the Mysteries of that time; things that belonged to the daily life; rather than to matters of policy, the stubborn tenacity of the City, or the changes that were coming over the conditions of existence and of trade. Again, in Plantagenet London one might have dwelt at length upon the action taken by London in successive civil wars. That, again, belongs to the historian. I have contented myself with sketching the churches and the monasteries, the palaces and the men-at-arms, the merchants and the workmen.

Again, in the time of George II., the increase of trade, which then advanced by leaps and bounds, the widening of the world to London enterprise, the part which London took in the conquest of India and the ejection of France from North America belong to history. For my own part I have preferred to show the position, the influence, and the work of the Church at a time generally believed to be the deadest period in the whole history of the Church of England. This done, I have gone on to illustrate the day-by-day life of the citizens, with the prices of things, the management, and the appearance of the City.

One thing remains to be said. Mr. Loftie, in his History of London (Stadford), first gave the world a reconstruction of the ground – the terrain – of London and its environs before ever a house was erected or an acre cleared. The first chapter of this book – that on Roman London and After – is chiefly due to a study of this map, and to realizing what that map means when applied to the scanty records of Augusta. This map enabled me to recover the years which followed the retreat of the Romans. I cannot allow this chapter to be called a Theory. It is, I venture to claim for it, nothing less than a Recovery.

WALTER BESANT.

United University Club:

I
AFTER THE ROMANS

The only real authorities for the events which took place in Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries are Gildas and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. There are other writers – Ethelwerd, for instance, who copied the Chronicle, and adds nothing; and Nennius, whose work, edited by one Mark the Hermit in the tenth century, was found in the Vatican. The first edition was published in London in the year 1819, in the original Latin, by the Rev. William Gunn. Nennius gives a brief account of King Arthur and his exploits, but he affords little or no information that is of use to us. The work of Richard of Cirencester is extremely valuable on account of its topography; it is also interesting as the work of the first English antiquary. But he belonged to the fourteenth century, and has added nothing to the history, of which he knew no more – less, indeed – than we ourselves can discover. The book named after Geoffrey of Monmouth is not worth a moment's serious consideration. In Bede's Ecclesiastical History passages may be found which throw side lights on this period, but they are few.

Gildas, called Badonicus, is supposed to have been born in or about the year 520, in Wales. A great mass of legend has collected about the name of Gildas. He was the son of a British kinglet; his three-and-twenty brothers fought under King Arthur. He himself preached, taught, and in the matter of miracles was greatly blessed. He wrote – if he did write – about the year 560, and is therefore contemporary with the events of which he speaks. His book contains a vast quantity of rhetoric to a very small amount of history. Unfortunately for him, he was called by his admiring fellow-monks, in his lifetime, Sapiens – the Wise. Perhaps, in order to live up to this designation, he was fain to assume the garb and language of a prophet, and, with what he thought prophetic force, which we now perceive to be ecclesiastical inflation, he proceeded to admonish princes and people of their sins. Every age, to the ecclesiastical prophet as to the secular satirist, is an age of unbounded profligacy; of vice such as the world has never before witnessed; of luxury advanced to heights hitherto untrodden; of license, wantonness, riot unbridled and unparalleled, insomuch that the city of Jerusalem, even when under the soft influences of Ahola and Aholibah, were really righteous and pure in comparison. No doubt Gildas lived in a most trying and most disappointing time. Things went wrong, and things went steadily from bad to worse. His people were defeated and driven continually westward; they could not even hold together and fight side by side against the common enemy; religion was forgotten in the fierce struggles for life, and in the fiercer civil dissensions. As for the enemy, Saxon, Angle, or Jute, all were alike, in that none had the least reverence for priest or for Church; everywhere fighting, defeat, and massacre. Yet one cannot but think that a lower note might have been struck with greater advantage; and now that it is impossible to learn how far the prophet's admonitions brought repentance to his kings, one regrets that a simple statement of the events in chronological order as they occurred was not thought useful or desirable in a historical work. Would you hear how the Sapient addresses kings? Listen. He is admonishing for his good the King of North Wales – Cuneglass by name:

"Thou, too, Cuneglass, why art thou fallen into the filth of thy former naughtiness? Yea, since the first spring of thy tender youth, thou Bear, thou Rider and Ruler of many and Guider of the chariot which is the receptacle of the Bear, thou Contemner of God and Vilifier of his order! Thou tawny Butcher! Why, besides thine other innumerable backslidings, having thrown out of doors thy wife, dost thou, against the apostle's express prohibition, esteem her detestable sister, who has vowed unto God everlasting continency, as the very flower of the celestial nymphs?"

In similar gentle strains he approaches, and delicately touches upon, the sins of other kings.

This kind of language is difficult to sustain, and sometimes leads to contradictions. Thus, in one sentence, the Sapient speaks of his countrymen as wholly ignorant of the art of war, and in another he tells how the flower of the British youth went off to fight for Maximus.

As regards the alleged luxury of the time, this poor monk wrote from a dismal cell, very likely of wattle and daub, certainly draughty and cold; his food was poor and scanty; his bed was hard; life to him was a long endurance. The roasted meats, the soft pillows and cushions, the heated rooms of the better sort, seemed to him detestable and wicked luxury, especially when he thought of the Saxons and Jutes overrunning the ruined country. Of course, in every age the wealthy will surround themselves with whatever comforts can be procured. We are in these days, for instance, advanced to what our ancestors would have called an inconceivable height of luxury. One would like to invite the luxurious Cuneglass to spend a day or two with a young man of the present day. Those who were neither rich nor free lived hardly, as they do to this day, but more hardly; those who were young and strong, even though they were not perhaps trained to the use of arms, easily learned how to use them, and when it came to victory or death, they soon recovered the old British spirit. This is not the place, otherwise it would be interesting to show what a long and gallant stand was made by these people whom it is customary to call cowardly and luxurious – these ancestors of the gallant Welsh.¹ It is manifest that a period of two hundred years and more of peace, almost profound, their frontiers and their coasts guarded for them by the legions of Rome, must have lowered the British spirit. But the people quickly recovered it. The Arthurian epic, it is certain, has plenty of foundation in fact, and perhaps poor King Cuneglass himself, the Bear and Butcher, wielded a valiant sword in spite of his family troubles. The Britons were, it is quite certain, prone to internal dissensions, which greatly assisted their defeat and conquest. But they had one bond of union. Their enemies were pagan; they were Christian. Gildas addresses a nation of Christians, not a church planted among idolaters. Christian symbols and emblems have been found everywhere on the site of Roman towns, not, it is true, in large quantities, but they are found; while, though altars have also been found, and pagan emblems and statuettes of gods, there are no ruins anywhere in Britain, except at Bath, of Roman temples. Their faith, like the Catholicism of the Irish, was their national symbol. It separated them broadly from their enemies; it gave them contempt for barbarians. The faith therefore flourished with great strength and vigor. But the popular Christianity seems to have been in Britannia, as everywhere, a very mixed kind of creed. As in Southern Italy among the peasants there linger to this day traditions, customs, and superstitions of paganism which the people call the Old Faith, so in Britain there lingered among the people ceremonies and beliefs which the Church vainly tried to suppress, or craftily changed into Christian observances. Such things linger still in Wales, though the traveller regards them not. In the same way the folk-lore of our own time in our own villages is still largely composed of the beliefs and superstitions inherited from our old English – not British – ancestors. What happens is always the same, and must be the same. In times of religious revolution the common folk change the name of their God, but not his nature or his attributes. Apollo becomes the Christ, but in the minds of the Italian peasants he remains the old Apollo. The great Sun-God, worshipped under so many names and with so many attributes, remains in the hearts of rustics long, long centuries after mass has been said and the Host has been elevated. Nay, it has even been said that the mass itself is an adaptation of pagan ritual to Christian worship. But the people, whatever their old beliefs, called themselves Christian, and that one fact enabled them to forget their jealousies and quarrels in times of emergency, and sometimes to act together. They were Christian; their enemies were pagan. It is significant that in one passage Gildas – who is quoted by Bede – reproaches them for not converting their conquerors, among whom they lived. This proves, if the fact wanted proof, (1) that the Britons were not exterminated by their conquerors; (2) that they were allowed to continue unmolested in their own religion; and (3) that they kept it to themselves as a possession of their own, a consolation in disaster, and a mark of superiority and dignity.

One thing is quite clear, that when the Roman legions finally withdrew, the Britons were left thoroughly awakened to the fact that if they could not fight they must perish. They understood once more the great law of humanity in all ages, that those who would enjoy in peace must be prepared to fight in war. They fought, therefore, valiantly; yet not so valiantly as the stronger race which came to drive them out.

In particular, however, we have to deal with the fate of London, which was then Augusta. Let us first endeavor to lay down the facts. They are to be drawn from two sources: the first from the meagre notes of the historians, the second from certain topographical and geographical considerations. The latter have never yet been fully presented, and I believe that the conclusion to be drawn by comparing the double set of facts will be accepted as irresistible.

The following are the facts related by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

A.D. 443. – This year the Britons sent over the sea to Rome, and begged for help against the Picts; but they had none, because they were themselves warring against Attila, King of the Huns. And then they sent to the Angles, and entreated the like of the Ethelings of the Angles.

A.D. 449. – Hengist and Horsa, invited by Vortigern, King of the Britons, landed in Britain on the shore called Wippidsfleet (Ebbsfleet?), at first in aid of the Britons, but afterwards they fought against them. King Vortigern gave them land in the south-east of this county on condition that they should fight against the Picts. They then fought against the Picts, and had the victory wheresoever they came. Then they sent to the Angles, desired a larger force to be sent, and caused them to be told the worthlessness of the Britons and the excellence of the land. Then they soon sent thither a larger force in aid of the others. At that time came men from three tribes in Germany – from the Old Saxons, from the Angles, and from the Jutes. From the Jutes came the Kentish men and the Wightwarians – that is, the tribe which now dwells in Wight, and that race among the West Saxons which is still called the race of Jutes. From the Old Saxons came the men of Essex, Sussex, and Wessex. From Anglia, which has ever since remained waste, betwixt the Jutes and Saxons, came the men of East Anglia, Middle Anglia, Mercia, and of Northumbria.

A.D. 455. – This year Hengist and Horsa fought against King Vortigern at the place called Ægelsthrop (Aylesford), and his brother Horsa was slain, and after that Hengist obtained the kingdom, and Æsc, his son.

A.D. 456. – This year Hengist and Æsc slew four troops of Britons with the edge of the sword in the place which is named Crecganford (Crayford).

A.D. 457. – This year Hengist and Æsc, his son, fought against the Britons at a place called Crecganford, and then slew 4000 men. And the Britons then forsook Kent, and in great terror fled to London.

A.D. 465. – This year Hengist and Æsc fought against the Welsh near Wippidsfleet (Ebbsfleet), and there slew twelve Welsh ealdormen, and one of their own Thanes was slain there whose name was Wippid.

A.D. 473. – This year Hengist and Æsc fought against the Welsh, and took spoils innumerable; and the Welsh fled from the Angles like fire.

A.D. 477. – This year Ælla and his three sons came to the land of Britain with their ships at a place called Cymensrova, and there slew many Welsh, and some they drove in flight into the wood that is named Andredes-lea. (Probably the landing was on the coast of Sussex.)

A.D. 485. – This year Ælla fought against the Welsh near the Bank of Mearcriediburn.

A.D. 491. – This year Ælla and Cissa besieged Andredacester (Pevensey), and slew all that dwelt therein, so that not a single Briton was left.

A.D. 495. – This year two ealdormen came to Britain, Cerdic, and Cynric his son, with five ships, at the place which is called Cerdicsore (probably Calshot Castle on Southampton water), and Stuf and Whitgen fought against the Britons and put them to flight.

A.D. 519. – This year Cerdic and Cynric obtained the kingdom of the West Saxons; and the same year they fought against the Britons where it is now named Cerdisford (Charford on the Avon near Fordingbridge).

A.D. 527. – This year Cerdic and Cynric fought against the Britons at the place called Ardicslea.

A.D. 530. – This year Cerdic and Cynric conquered the Island of Wight, and slew many men at Whit-garan-byrg (Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight).

A.D. 547. – This year Ida began to reign, from whom came the royal race of Northumberland.

The conquest of England was now virtually completed. There was fighting at Old Sarum in 552; at Banbury in 556; at Bedford, at Aylesbury, and at Benson, in the year 571. One would judge this to be a last sortie made by the Welsh who had been driven into the fens. In the year 577 three important places in the west are taken – Gloucester, Bath, and Cirencester. In 584 there was fighting at Fethan-lea (Frethern), when the victor took many towns and spoils innumerable; "and wrathful he thence returned to his own." As late as 596 we hear that the king of the West Saxons fought, and contended incessantly against either the Angles (his own cousins), or the Welsh, or the Picts, or the Scots; and in 607 was fought the great battle of Chester, in which "numberless" Welsh were slain, including two hundred priests who had come to pray for victory.

It is therefore evident that the conquest of the country took a long time to effect – not less, indeed, than two hundred years. First, Kent, with Surrey, fell; next, Sussex; both before the end of the fifth century. Early in the sixth century the West Saxons conquered the country covered by Hampshire, a part of Surrey, and Dorsetshire; next, Essex fell, and there was stubborn fighting for many years in the country about and beyond the great Middlesex forest. The conquest of the North concerns us little, save that it drew off some of those who were fighting in what afterwards became the Kingdom of Mercia. I desire to note here only the surroundings of London, and to mark how, by successive steps of the invaders' march, it was gradually cut off, bit by bit, from the surrounding country. Thus, when Kent was overrun, the bridge gate was closed, the roads south, south-west, and south-east were blocked, and the whole of that country cut off from London; at the fall of Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk, the eastern gate was closed, and that great district was cut off. When Wessex was an established kingdom, the river highway was closed; there then remained only the western gate, and that, during the whole of the sixth century, led out into a country perpetually desolated and destroyed by war, so that, by the middle of the sixth century, no more communication whatever was possible between London and the rest of the country, unless the people made a sortie and cut their way through the enemy.

Observe, however, that no mention whatever is made of London in the Chronicle. Other and less important towns are mentioned. Anderida or Pevensey, Aquæ Solis or Bath, Gloucester, Chester, and many others; but of London there is no mention. Consider: London, though not much greater than other cities in the country – York, Verulam, Lincoln, Colchester, for instance – was undoubtedly the chief port of the country. We must not bring modern ideas to bear when we read of the vast trade, the immense concourse of merchants, and so forth. We need not picture miles of docks and countless masts. Roman London was not modern Liverpool. Its bulk of trade was perfectly insignificant compared with that of the present. When we begin to consider the mediæval trade of London this will become apparent. Still, it was, up to the coming of the Saxons, a vigorous and flourishing place, and the chief port of the country. Why, therefore, does the Chronicle absolutely pass over so great an event as the taking of London?

Such is the evidence of history. Let us consider next the evidence of topography. We shall understand what happened in London when we understand the exceptional position of London and the dangers to which the city in time of civil war was necessarily exposed.

We will go back to the beginning of all things – to the lie of the land on which London was planted. The reader, if he will consult that very admirable book, Loftie's History of London, will find in it a most instructive map. It shows the terrain before the city was built at all. The river Thames, between Mortlake on the west and Blackwall on the east, pursued a serpentine way, in the midst of marshes stretching north and south. There were marshes all the way. At spring tides, and at all tides a little above the common, these marshes were under water; they were always swampy and covered with ponds; half a dozen tributary brooks flowed into them and were lost in them. They varied greatly in breadth, being generally much broader on the south side than on the north. On this side the higher land rose up abruptly in a cliff or steep hill from twenty to five-and-thirty feet in height. The cliff, as we follow it from the east, approached the river, touched it at one point, and then receded again as it went westward. This point, where the cliff overhung the river, was the only possible place where the city could have been founded.

I call it a point, but it consisted of two hillocks, both about thirty-five feet high, standing on either side the little stream of Walbrook, where it flows into the Thames. On one of these hills, probably that on the west, was a small fortress of the Britons, constructed after the well-known fashion of hill forts, numberless examples of which remain scattered about the country. On the other hillock the Roman city, later on, was first commenced.

Here, at the beginning of the city, was instituted very early a ferry over the river. On the eastern hill the Romans built their forum and basilica, with the offices and official houses and quarters. When foreign trade began to increase, the merchants were obliged to spread themselves along the bank. They built quays and river-walls to keep out the water, and the city extended laterally to east and west, just as far as was convenient for the purposes of trade – that is, not farther than Fleet River on the west, and the present site of the Tower on the east. It then began to spread northward, but very slowly, because a mile of river front can accommodate a great working population with a very narrow backing of houses. When the city wall was built, somewhere about the year 360, the town had already run out in villas and gardens as far north as that wall. Outside the wall there was nothing at all, unless one may count a few scattered villas on the south side of the river. There was as yet no Westminster, but in its place a broad and marshy heath spread over the whole area now covered by the City of Westminster, Millbank, St. James's Park, Chelsea, and as far west as Fulham. Beyond the wall on the north lay dreary, uncultivated plains, covered with fens and swamps, stretching from the walls to the lower slopes of the northern hills, and to the foot of an immense forest, as yet wholly untouched, afterwards called the Middlesex Forest. Fragments of this forest yet remain at Hampstead, Highgate, Epping, and Hainault. All through this period, therefore, and for long after, the City of London had a broad marsh lying on the south, another on the west, a third on the east, while on the north there stretched a barren, swampy moorland, followed by an immense impenetrable forest. Later on a portion of the land lying on the north-west, where is now Holborn, was cleared and cultivated. But this was later, when the Roman roads which led out of London ran high and broad over the marshes and the moors and through the forest primeval. The point to be remembered as connected with the marshes is this: Around most great towns there is found a broad belt of cultivated ground protected by the wall and the garrison. Here the people grow for their own use their grain and their fruit, and pasture their beasts and their swine. London, alone among great cities, never had any such home farm until the marsh was reclaimed. The cattle, which were driven daily along the roads into the city, grazed on pastures in Essex farms, beyond the forest and the River Lea. The corn which filled her markets came down the river in barges from the inland country. All the supplies necessary for the daily food of the city were brought in from the country round. Should these supplies be cut off, London would be starved.

These supplies were very large indeed. As said above, we may set aside as extravagant the talk of a vast and multitudinous throng of people, as if the place was already a kind of Liverpool. Augusta never, certainly, approached the importance of Massilia, of Bordeaux, of Antioch, of Ephesus. Nor was Augusta greater than other English towns. The walls of York enclose as large an area as those of Roman London. The wall of Uriconium encloses an area nearly equal to that of Roman London. The area of Calleva (Silchester), a country town of no great importance, is nearly half as great as that of Roman London. But it was a large and populous city. How populous we cannot even approximately guess. Considering the extent of the wall, if that affords any help, we find, counting the river front, that the wall was two miles and three-quarters in length. This is a great length to defend. It is, however, certain that the town when walled must have contained a population strong enough to defend their wall. The Romans knew how to build in accordance with their wants and their resources. If the wall was built three miles long, there were certainly defenders in proportion. Now, could so great a length be intrusted to a force less than 20,000? The defenders of the walls of Jerusalem, which, after the taking of the third wall, were very much less than two miles in extent, demanded at least 25,000 men, as Titus very well knew. Now, if every able-bodied man in London under the age of five-and-fifty were called out to fight, the population, on the assumption of 20,000 suitable men, would be about 70,000. If, on the other hand, the London citizens after the departure of the Romans could man their walls with only 10,000 men, they would have a population of about 35,000. Now, the daily needs of a population of only 35,000 are very considerable. We have, it is true, to supply food for 5,000,000, but the brain is incapable of comprehending figures and estimates of such vastness. One can better understand those which have to do with a population of 30,000 or 40,000. So much bread, so much meat, so much wine, beer, and fruit. Where did all these things come from? Nothing, as I have said, from the immediate neighborhood; chiefly from Surrey and from Kent; a great deal from Essex; and the rest from the west country by means of the river.

London, therefore, with a population of not less than 35,000, and perhaps upwards of 70,000, stood in the midst of marshes – marshes everywhere – marshes all around except in the north; and there impenetrable forest. It depended wholly for its supplies, for its daily bread, for its existence, upon the country around.

In order to buy these supplies it depended upon its trade of import and export. It was the only port in the kingdom; it received the hides, the iron, and the slaves from inland and embarked them in the foreign keels; it received from abroad the silks, the spices, the wines, the ecclesiastical vestments, and all the articles of foreign luxury, and sent them about the country.

But this important place changed hands, somehow, without so much as a mention from the contemporary records; and while places like Bath, Gloucester, Cirencester, are recorded as being besieged and taken, no word is said of London, a place of far greater importance.

It has been suggested that the siege of London was not followed by a massacre as at Anderida, and that there was no great battle as at Chester; but that the place was quietly surrendered and the lives of the people spared. This is a thing absolutely impossible during these two centuries. The English invader did not make war in such a manner. If he attacked a town and took it by assault he killed everybody who did not run away. That was his method: that was how he understood war. If he pushed out his invading arms he killed the occupants of the land, unless, which sometimes happened, they killed him, or, as more often happened, they ran away. But of making terms, sparing lives, suffering people to remain in peaceful occupation of their houses we hear nothing, because such a thing never happened until the close of the war, when victory was certain to one side and resistance was impossible to the other. Mercy was not as yet in the nature of Angle, Jute, or Saxon.

Suppose, however, that it did happen. Suppose that after that great rout of Craysford the victorious army had pushed forward and taken the city, or had accepted surrender in this peaceful nineteenth-century fashion, so entirely opposite to their received and customary method, what would have happened next?

Well, there would have been continuity of occupation. Most certainly and without doubt this continuity of occupation would have been proved by many signs, tokens, and survivals. For instance, the streets. The old streets would have remained in their former positions. Had they been burned down they would have been rebuilt as before. Nothing is more conservative and more slow to change than an old street. Where it is first laid out there it remains. The old lanes which formerly ran between gardens and at the back of houses, are still the narrow streets of the City. In their names the history of their origin remains. In Garlickhithe, Fyfoot Lane, Suffolk Lane, Tower Royal, Size Lane, Old Jewry, the Minories, and in a hundred other names, we have the identical mediæval streets, with the identical names given to them from their position and their association. And this though fire after fire has burned them down, and since one fire at least destroyed most of them at a single effort. A Roman town was divided, like a modern American town, into square blocks – insulæ (islands) they were called. Where are the insulæ of London? There is not in the whole of London a single trace of the Roman street, if we except that little bit still called after the name given by the Saxons to a Roman road.

Again, continuity of occupation is illustrated by tradition. It is impossible for the traditions of the past to die out if the people continue. Nay, if the conqueror makes slaves of the former lords, and if they remain in their servitude for many generations, yet the traditions will not die. There are traditions of these ancient times among the Welsh, but among the Londoners there are none. The Romans – the Roman power – the ferocity of Boadicea, the victorious march of Theodosius, the conversion of the country, the now forgotten saints and martyrs of London – these would have been remembered had there been continuity of occupation. But not a single trace remains.

Or, again, continuity of tenure is proved by the survival of customs. What Roman customs were ever observed in London? There is not a trace of any. Consider, however, the customs which still linger among the Tuscan, the Calabrian, and the Sicilian peasants. They are of ancient origin; they belong to the Roman time and earlier. But in London there has never been a custom or an observance in the least degree traceable to the Roman period.

Lastly, continuity of tenure is illustrated by the names of the people. Now, a careful analysis of the names found in the records of the fourteenth century has been made by Riley in his Memorials of London. We need not consider the surnames, which are all derived from occupation, or place of birth, or some physical peculiarity. The Christian names are for the most part of Norman origin; some are Saxon; none are Roman or British.

It has been advanced by some that the municipal government of the town is of Roman origin. If that were so, it would be through the interference of the Church. But it is not so. I believe that all who have considered the subject have now acknowledged that the municipal institutions of London have grown out of the customs of the English conquerors.

To sum up, because this is very important. When in the seventh century we find the Saxons in the possession of the city there is no mention made of any siege, attack, capture, or surrender. When, a little later, we are able to read contemporary history, we find not a single custom or law due to the survival of British customs. We find the courses of the old streets entirely changed, the very memory of the streets swept away; not a single site left of any ancient building. Everything is clean gone. Not a voice, not a legend, not a story, not a superstition remains of the stately Augusta. It is entirely vanished, leaving nothing behind but a wall.

Loftie's opinion is thus summed up (London, vol. i., p. 54):

Roman evidences, rather negative, it is true, than positive to show that the East Saxons found London desolate, with broken walls, and a scanty population if any; that they entered on possession with no great feeling of exultation, after no great military feat deserving mention in these Chronicles; and that they retained it only just so long as the more powerful neighboring kings allowed them. This view is the only one which occurs to me to account for the few facts we have.

And that great antiquary Guest thinks that good reasons may be given for the belief that London for a while lay desolate and uninhabited.

The evidence seems to me positive rather than negative, and, in fact, conclusive. London, I am convinced, must – not may, but must – have remained for a time desolate and empty.

The evidence is before us, to me clear and unanswerable; it is furnished by the Chronicle of Conquest, coupled with the question of supplies. The city could receive supplies from six approaches. One of these, called afterwards Watling Street, connected the city with the north and the west. It entered the walls at what became, later, Newgate. The second and third entered near the present Bishopsgate. One of these, Ermyn Street, led to the north-east, to Norfolk and Suffolk, the great peninsula, with fens on one side and the ocean on two other sides; the other, the Vicinal way, brought provisions and merchandise from Essex, then and long afterwards thought to be the garden of England. The bridge connected the city with the south, while the river itself was the highway between London and the fertile counties on either side the broad valley of the Thames. By these six ways there were brought into the city every day a continual supply of all the necessaries of life and all its luxuries. Along the roads plodded the pack-horses and the heavy, grinding carts; the oxen and the sheep and the pigs were driven to the market; barges floated down the stream laden with flour, and with butter, cheese, poultry, honey, bacon, beans, and lentils; and up the river there sailed with every flood the ships coming to exchange their butts of wine, their bales of silk, their boxes of spice, for iron, skins, and slaves.

In this way London was fed and its people kept alive. In this way London has always been fed. The moorland and swamps all around continued far down in her history. Almost in the memory of man there were standing pools at Bankside, Lambeth, and Rotherhithe. It is not two hundred years since Moorfields were drained. Wild-fowl were shot on the low-lying lands of Westminster within the present century. The supplies came from without. They were continuous. It is impossible to keep in store more provisions – and those only of the most elementary kind – than will last for a short period. There may have been a city granary, but if the supplies were cut off, how long would its contents continue to feed a population, say, of thirty-five thousand?

Four points, in short, must be clearly understood:

(1) London was a port with a great trade, export and import. To carry on this trade she employed a very large number of men – slaves or free men.

(2) If she lost her trade her merchants were ruined, and her people lost their work and their livelihood.

(3) The lands immediately round London – beneath her walls – produced nothing. She was therefore wholly dependent on supplies from without.

(4) If these supplies failed, she was starved.

Now you have seen the testimony of history. The port of London closed by the ships of the Kentish and the Essex shores; communications with the country gradually cut off; first, with the south; next, with the east; then, by the river; lastly, by the one gate which still stood open, but led only into a country ravaged by continual war, and overrun by an enemy who still pushed the Britons farther west. There was no longer any trade; that, indeed, began to languish in the middle of the fifth century; there were no longer either exports or imports. When there were no longer any supplies, what happened? What must have happened?

Let me consider the history from a contemporary Londoner's point of view. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is written from the conqueror's view; the prophecies of Gildas take the ecclesiastical line, that misfortunes fall upon a nation because of their wickedness, which is perfectly true if their wickedness leads them to cowardly surrender or flight, but not otherwise, or else the Saxons, whose wickedness, if you come to look at it, was really amazing, would themselves have been routed with great slaughter, and smitten hip and thigh. There are sins and sins. Those which do not corrupt a nation's valor do not cause a nation's fall.

This is what the man of London saw. It is a hitherto unpublished chapter from the Chronicle of a layman, a British citizen:

"The Legions left us. They had gone away before, but returned at our solicitations to drive back the Picts and Scots who overran the land (but reached not the walls of London). This done, they went away for good. And now, indeed, we understood that our long security was over, and that we must arise and defend ourselves, or meet with the fate that overtakes the weak and cowardly. They put up for us a wall before they went away, but the wall availed not long. No walls are of any avail unless there be valiant defenders behind. Then the enemy once more overran the country. To them were joined pirates from Ireland. Thus the land of Britain seemed given over to destruction, especially in the North and West. The merchants who traded with these parts were now driven to sore straits, because no goods came to them from their friends, nor were those who were once wealthy able to purchase any more the luxuries which had formerly been their daily food. But in the lands east and south, and that part of the country lying east of the fenny country, the people were free from alarms, and feared nothing, being protected by the sea on one hand and the fens on the other; so that we in London looked on with disquiet, it is true, but not with alarm. Nay, the situation looked hopeful when our people, recovering their spirit, drove out the enemy, and once more sat down to cultivate the lands. For a few years there was peace, with plentiful harvests and security. Then our trade again revived, and so great was the quantity of corn, hides, iron, and tin which was brought to our ports and shipped for foreign countries that the old prosperity of Augusta seemed destined to be doubled and trebled. Many merchants there were – wise men and far-seeing – who taught that we should take advantage of this respite from the greed and malice of our enemies to imitate the Romans, and form legions of our own, adding that the island wanted nothing but security to become a great treasure-house or garden, producing all manner of fruit, grain, and cattle for the maintenance and enrichment of the people. This counsel, however, was neglected.

"Then there fell upon the country a plague which carried off an immense number. The priests said that the plague, as well as the Pict and the Scot, came upon us as a visitation for our sins. That may be, though I believe our chief and greatest sin was that of foolishness in not providing for our own defence.

"Now we had long been troubled, even when the Count of the Saxon Shore guarded our coasts, by sudden descents of pirates upon our shores. These devils, who had fair hair and blue eyes, and were of greater stature than our own people, carried swords a yard long, and round wooden shields faced with leather. Some of them also had girdle daggers and long spears. They were extremely valiant, and, rushing upon their foes with shouts, generally bore them down and made them run. They seemed to know, being guided by the Evil One, what places were least defended and therefore most open to attack. Hither would they steer their keels, and landing, would snatch as much pillage as they could, and so sail home with loaded vessels, at sight of which their brothers and their cousins and all the ravenous crew hungered to join in the sport.

"In an evil moment, truly, for Britannia, our King invited these people to help in driving off the other enemies. They willingly acceded. So the lion willingly accepts the protection of the flock and drives off the wolves. This done, he devours the silly sheep. Not long after a rumor reached the Bridge that the Jutes had arrived in great numbers and were warring with the men of Cantia. This news greatly disquieted the City, not only because from that country, which was rich and populous, great quantities of food came to the City, with grain and hides for export, but also because the fleets on their way passed through the narrow waters between Ruim, which the Jutes call the Isle of Thanet, and the main-land, on their way to Rutupiæ and thence across the sea to Gallia. The rumor was confirmed; and one day there came into the City across the Bridge, their arms having been thrown away, the defeated army, flying from the victorious Jutes. After this we learned every day of the capture and destruction of our rich ships in the narrow waters above-named, insomuch that we were forced to abandon this route and to attempt the stormy seas beyond the cliffs of Ruim; and the perils of our sailors were increased, with the risk of our merchants, insomuch that prayers were offered in all the churches; and those who divined and foretold the future, after the manner of the old times before the light of the Gospel shone upon us, came forth again and were consulted by many, especially by those who had ships to sail or expected ships to arrive. The priests continually reproached us with our sins and exhorted us to repentance, whereof nothing came, unless it were the safety of the souls of those who repented. But while one or two counselled again that we should imitate the Romans and form legions of our own, others were for making terms with the enemy, so that our trade might continue and the City should grow rich. In the end we did nothing. We did not repent, so far as I could learn, but who knows the human heart? So long as we could we continued to eat and drink of the best, and we formed no legions.

"Why should I delay? Still the invaders flocked over. Of one nation all came – men, women, and children – leaving a desert behind. In the year of our Lord 500, the whole of the east and most of the south country were in the hands of this new people. Now this strange thing has been observed of them. They love not towns, and will not willingly dwell within walls for some reason connected with their diabolical religion; or perhaps because they suspect magic. Therefore, when they conquered the country, they occupied the lands indeed, and built thereon their farm-houses, but they left the towns deserted. When they took a place they utterly burned and destroyed it, and then they left it, so that at this day there are many once rich and flourishing towns which now stand desolate and deserted. For instance, the city and stronghold of Rutupiæ, once garrisoned by the Second Legion; this they took and destroyed. It is reported that its walls still stand, but it is quite deserted. So also Anderida, where they massacred every man, woman, and child, and then went away, leaving the houses in ashes and the dead to the wolves; and they say that Anderida still stands deserted. So, also, Calleva Atrebatum, which they also destroyed, and that, too, stands desolate. So, too, Durovernum, which they now call Cantwarabyrig. This they destroyed, and for many years it lay desolate, but is now, I learn, again peopled. So, too, alas! the great and glorious Augusta, which now lies empty, a city lone and widowed, which before was full of people.

"When Cantia fell to the Jutes we lost our trade with that fair and rich province. When the East Saxons and the Angles occupied the east country, and the South Saxons the south, trade was lost with all this region. Then the gates of the Vicinal Way and that of the Bridge were closed. Also the navigation of the Lower Thames became full of danger. And the prosperity of Augusta daily declined. Still there stood open the great highway which led to the middle of Britannia and the north, and the river afforded a safe way for barges and for boats from the west. But the time came when these avenues were closed. For the Saxons stretched out envious hands from their seaboard settlements, and presently the whole of this rich country, where yet lived so many great and wealthy families, was exposed to all the miseries of war. The towns were destroyed, the farms ruined, the cattle driven away. Where was now the wealth of this famous province? It was gone. Where was the trade of Augusta? That, too, was gone. Nothing was brought to the port for export; the roads were closed; the river was closed; there was nothing, in fact, to send; nay, there were no more households to buy the things we formerly sent them. They lived now by the shore and in the recesses of the forest, who once lived in great villas, lay on silken pillows, and drank the wine of Gaul and Spain.

"Then we of the City saw plainly that our end was come; for not only there was no more trade, but there was no more food. The supplies had long been scanty, and food was dear; therefore those who could no longer buy food left the town, and sallied forth westward, hoping to find a place of safety, but many perished of cold, of hunger, and by sword of the enemy. Some who reached towns yet untaken joined the warriors, and received alternate defeat and victory, yet mostly the former.

"Still food became scarcer. The foreign merchants by this time had all gone away; our slaves deserted us; the wharves stood desolate; a few ships without cargo or crew lay moored beside our quays; our churches were empty; silence reigned in the streets. Now, had the enemy attacked the City there would have been no resistance, but no enemy appeared. We were left alone – perhaps forgotten. The marshes and moors which surround the City on all sides became our protection. Augusta, to the invader, was invisible. And she was silent. Her enmity could do no harm, and her friendship could do no good. She was full of rich and precious things; the Basilica and the Forum, with the columns and the statues, stood in the midst; the houses contained pictures, books, baths, costly hangings; yet the Saxon wanted none of these things. The City contained no soldiers, and therefore he passed it by, or even forgot its existence.

"There came the day when no more provisions were left. Then those who were left, a scanty band, gathered in the Basilica, and it was resolved that we should leave the place, since we could no longer live in it. Some proposed to try escape by sea, some by land. I, with my wife and children, and others who agreed to accompany me, took what we could of food and of weapons, leaving behind us the houses where our lives had been so soft and happy, and went out by the western gate, and taking refuge where we could in the forest, we began our escape. Mostly we travelled by night; we passed burning towns and flaming farmsteads; we encountered hapless fugitives more naked and miserable than ourselves. But finally we arrived in safety at the town of Glevum, where we have found shelter and repose.

"Every year our people are driven westward more and more. There seems no frontier that will stop them. My sons have fallen in battle; my daughters have lost their husbands; my grandchildren are taught to look for nothing but continual war. Should they succeed in reaching our City, the old will perish; but the young may take flight across the river Sabrina, and even among the mountains of the West – their last place of flight. Should they be driven from the hills, it will be into the sea. And of Augusta have I learned nothing for many years. Wherefore am I sure that it remains desolate and deserted to this day."

The writer of this journal, most valuable and interesting – even unique – was not quite right. Not all the inhabitants of Augusta went away. In the city a remnant was left – there is always a remnant. Some of them were slaves. All of them were of the baser sort, whose safety, when cities are taken by assault and massacres are abroad, lies in their abject poverty and in the dens wherein they crouch. These remained; there were not many of them, because hunger had already driven away most. When the rest were gone they came out of their holes and looked about them, irresolute. Seeing no enemy, they hastily shut and barred the city gates and sat down fearful. But days passed, and no attack was made upon them. Then they began to take courage, and they presently bethought them that the whole town was their own to plunder and to pillage. They began, therefore, with great joy to collect together the things which the people had been unable to carry with them – the sacred vessels from the churches and the rich embroidered robes of silk worn by the priests. They found soft stuffs in the villas, with which they wrapped themselves; they found curtains, rich hangings, pillows, cushions, carpets – all of which they took. The carved work and statues, books, pictures, and things which they understood not they broke in pieces or burned. They carried off their plunder to the houses on the river-side – the quarter which they chose as handy to their boats in case of an alarm and convenient for fishing – on which they now placed their chief reliance for food. When they found that no one molested them they ventured out into the Northern forest, where they trapped the deer and the boar. Their thin veneer of civilization was speedily lost: when they had used up all the fine clothes, when they had burned up all the wood-work in the place, when the roofs of their houses fell in, they went back to quite the ancient manner; they made a circular hut with a fire in the middle of it, around which they crouched. They had no more blankets and woollen cloaks, but they did very well with a wild beast's skin for dress. Their religion slipped away and was forgotten; indeed, that was the first thing to go. But, which was strange, they had not even kept the remembrance of their ancestors' worship. If they had any religion at all, it was marked by cruel sacrifices to a malignant unseen being.

By this time nothing remained of the old houses but their walls, and these, disintegrated by frost and rain, were mostly ready to fall; the gardens of the villas, the beautiful gardens in which their owners took so much delight, were choked and overgrown with nettles and brambles; the mosaic pavements were covered up with rubbish and mould.

How long did this go on? For fifty years or more. The rude survivors of Augusta and their children lived neglected and forgotten, like the Arabs in the ruins of Palmyra. Outside they knew that a fierce enemy roamed the country; sometimes they could see a band of them on the southern bank gazing curiously at the silent and deserted walls of the City. But these warriors cared nothing for cities, and shuddered, suspecting magic at the sight of the gray wall, and went away again.

One day, however, because nothing remains always undiscovered, there came along the great Vicinal Way so tough and strong, on which the tooth of Time gnawed in vain, a troop of East Saxons. They were an offshoot, a late arrival, a small colony looking about if haply they could find or conquer a convenient place of settlement not yet held by their own people. They marched along the road, and presently saw before them the gray walls of the City, with its gates and bastions. It was a city of which they had heard – once full of people, now, like so many others, a waste chester. It was of no use to them; they wanted a place convenient for farming, not a place encumbered with ruins of houses; a place where they could set up their village community and grow their crops and keep their cattle. The first rush and fury of battle were now over. The East Saxons were at peace, the enemy being either driven away or killed. A single generation of comfort and prosperity had made the people milder in temper. They desired no longer to fight and slay. What, however, if they were to visit the City?

The gate was closed. They blew their horns and called upon the people, if there were any, to surrender. There was no answer. No arrow was shot from the walls, not a stone was thrown, not a head was seen upon the bastion. Then they plied their axes upon the crumbling wood until the gate gave way and fell backward with a crash. Shouting, the men of Essex ran forward. But they soon ceased to shout. Within they found a deserted city; the walls of what had been stately villas stood in broad gardens, but the houses were roofless, the pictured pavements were broken or covered up, the fountains were choked, the walls were tottering. The astonished warriors pressed forward. The ruined villas gave way to crumbling remains of smaller houses standing close together. The streets showed signs of traffic in deep ruts worn by the cart-wheels. Grass grew between the stones. Here and there stood buildings larger than the houses; they, too, were roofless, but over the lintels were carved certain curious emblems – crosses and palm-branches, lambs, vine leaves, and even fish – the meaning of which they understood not. Then the men reached the river-side. Here there had also been a wall, but much of it was broken down; and here they found certain circular huts thatched. Within, the fire was still burning in the middle of the hut. There were signs of hurried departure – the fish was still in the frying-pan, the bed of dried leaves still warm. Where were the people?

They were gone. They had fled in affright. When they heard the shouts of the Saxons, they gathered together their weapons and such things as they could carry, and they fled. They passed out by the gate of that road which their conquerors afterwards called Watling Street. Outside the City they turned northward, and plunged for safety into the pathless forest, whither the enemy would not follow.

When these Saxons found that the walled area contained nothing that was of the least use to them they simply went away. They left it quite alone, as they left the places which they called Pevensey, Silchester, Porchester, and Richborough, and as they left many other waste chesters.

Then Augusta lay silent and dead for a space.

Presently the fugitives crept back and resumed their old life among the ruins and died peacefully, and were followed by their children.

How, then, did London get settled again?

The times became peaceful: the tide of warfare rolled westward; there were no more ships crossing with fresh invaders; there were no more pirates hovering about the broad reaches of the Lower Thames. The country round London on all sides – north, south, east, and west – was settled and in tranquillity. The river was safe. Then a few merchants, finding that the way was open, timidly ventured up the river with wares such as might tempt those fair-haired savages. They went to the port of which the memory survived. No one disputed with them the possession of the grass-grown quays; there were no people, there was no market, there were no buyers. They then sent messengers to the nearest settlements; these – the first commercial travellers, the first gentlemen of the road – showed spear-heads of the finest, swords of the stoutest, beautiful helmets and fine shields, all to be had in exchange for wool and hides. The people learned to trade, and London began to revive. The rustics saw things that tempted them; new wants, new desires were created in their minds. Some of them went into the town and admired its life, how busy it was, how full of companionship; and they thought with pity of the quiet country life and the long days all alone in the fields; they desired to stay there; others saw the beauty of the arts, and were attracted by natural aptitude to learn and practise them. Others, quicker witted than the rest, perceived how by trade a man may live without his own handiwork and by the labor of his brother man. No discovery ever was made more important to the world than this great fact. "You, my brother," said this discoverer, "shall continue to dig and to toil, in hot weather or cold; your limbs shall stiffen and your back shall be bent; I, for my part, will take your work and sell it in places where it is wanted. My shoulders will not grow round, nor will my back be bent. On the contrary, I shall walk jocund and erect, with a laughing eye and a dancing leg, when you are long past laugh or saraband. It is an excellent division of labor. To me the market, where I shall sit at ease chaffering with my wares and jesting with my fellows and feasting at night. To you the plough and the sickle and the flail. An excellent division."

Then more merchants came, and yet more merchants, and the people began to flock in from the country as they do now; and London – Augusta being dead – set her children to work, making some rich, for an example and a stimulus – else no one would work – and keeping the many poor – else there would be no chance for the few to get rich. And she has kept them at work ever since. So that it came to pass when Bishop Mellitus, first of the bishops of London, came to his diocese in the year 604, he found it once more a market and a port with a goodly trade and a crowd of ships and a new people, proud, turbulent, and independent.

So began and so grew modern London.

To the old Rome it owes nothing, not so much as a tradition. Later, when another kind of influence began, London learned much and took much from Rome; but from Augusta – from Roman London – nothing. Roman traditions, Roman speech, Roman superstitions linger yet among the southern Spaniards, though the Moor conquered and held the country for six hundred years. They linger, in spite of many conquests, in France, in Italy (north and south), in Roumania, in Anatolia. In London alone, of all the places which Imperial Rome made her own, and kept for hundreds of years, no trace of ancient Rome remains. When London next hears of the Eternal City it is Rome of the Christian Church.

Compare the conquest of London by the men of Essex with that of Jerusalem by Titus. The latter conqueror utterly destroyed the city, and drove out its people. One might have expected the silence of Silchester or Pevensey. No, the people crept back by degrees; the old traditions remained and still remain. Behind the monkish sites are those familiar to the common people. Here is the old place of execution – the monks knew nothing of that – here is the valley of Hinnom; here that of Kedron. These memories have not died. But of the old Augusta nothing at all remains. Not a single tradition was preserved by the scanty remnant of slaves which survived the conquest; not a single name survives. All the streets have been renamed – nay, their very course has been changed. The literature of the City, which, like Bordeaux, had its poets and its schools of rhetoric, has disappeared; it has vanished as completely as that of Carthage. All the memories of four hundred years have gone; there is nothing left but a few fragments of the old wall, and these seem to contain but little of the Roman work: an old bath, part of the course of an ancient street, and the fragment which we call London Stone. Perhaps some portions of the Roman river-wall have been unearthed, but this is uncertain.

One fact alone has been considered to suggest that some of the old Roman buildings remained and were used again for their old purposes.

In the oldest part of the City, that which lies along the river-bank, the churches are mostly dedicated to the apostles. Those which stand farther inland are dedicated to local and later saints – St. Dunstan, St. Botolph, St. Osyth, St. Ethelburga, for instance. But among those along the river are the churches of St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary, St. Stephen, St. Michael. It is therefore suggested, but with hesitation, that when the East Saxons took possession they found the Roman basilicas still standing; that when they became converted they learned the original purpose of their churches and the meaning of the emblems; that they proceeded to rebuild them, preserving their dedications, and made them their own churches. This may be so, but I do not think it at all likely. It is possible, I say, but not probable.

You have heard the story how Augusta disappeared, and how the East Saxons found it deserted, and how London was born, not the daughter of Augusta at all. Augusta was childless.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER I

The principal Roman buildings consisted of a bridge, a wall, a fort at either end of this bridge, and two ports – Queenhithe and Billingsgate. No one knows when the bridge was built: the wall was not erected until some time between A.D. 350 and A.D. 369. At that time the area enclosed by the wall was covered with villas and gardens. The wall has been traced with certainty, and portions either of the original wall or the mediæval repairs have been found in many places, and may still be seen above-ground. The Roman remains which have been dug up consist of mosaic pavements, sepulchral cists, keys, toilet articles, lamps, fibulæ, amphoræ, domestic things, and a few bronze statuettes. Nothing whatever has been found to show that Augusta was ever a great city, in the sense that Massilia, Ephesus, Bordeaux, or Alexandria was great.

II
SAXON AND NORMAN

The citizens of New London – Augusta having thus perished – were from the outset a people of mixed race. But the Saxons, and especially the East Saxons, prevailed. Strangely, it is Essex which has always prevailed in London. The modern Cockney dialect, which says "laidy" and "baiby" for lady and baby, and "whoy" and "hoigh" for why and high, is pure Essex: you can hear it spoken all over the country districts of that little-visited county: it is a dialect so strong that it destroys all other fashions of speech, even the burr of Cumberland and the broad drawl of Devonshire. Saxon London was mainly East Saxon. But, besides the new owners of London, there was, first of all, some remnant of the scattered Welsh. I do not mean the miserable survivors of Augustan London, found in the place when it was first entered, but those Britons who had taken refuge in the forests of Surrey, Sussex, and Middlesex, and there lived as they could, until they could safely venture forth among their conquerors. Gildas, as we have seen, speaks of these people; and their skulls remain in the Saxon cemeteries to prove how great a Celtic element survived among the English conquerors. Next, there were the foreign merchants. This class formed a considerable proportion of the better class; and it grew larger every day, because the East Saxon was certainly not so sharp in affairs as the "man of Rouen;" nor was he in business capacity equal to the Fleming and the German. But as happens, mutatis mutandis, at the present day, those who were Flemings and the men of Rouen, speaking their own language, under Ethelred, had all become Londoners, speaking the English tongue, under Henry Beauclerk.

It was, indeed, a complete revolution in his manners and customs for the East Saxon when he exchanged his village community for a walled town. Consider: at first he lived retired in the country, farming and cattle-breeding, banded with other families for safety; he kept up the customs of his fatherland, he carried on no trade, he suffered the old towns to fall into ruin; his kinglet had no capital, but roamed about from place to place, administering justice in the royal wagon; he enjoyed a ferocious and blood-thirsty religion suiting his savage disposition; he knew only the simplest arts; he could till the ground, grind his corn, brew beer and mead, and work a little in metals; his women could spin; he knew no letters; he looked for nothing better than ever-recurring war, with intervals of peace and feasting; to die on a battle-field was an enviable lot, because it carried him away to everlasting happiness. Look at the same man four hundred years later. He is now a Christian; he is, in a way, a scholar; he is an architect, an artist, an illuminator, a musician, a law-maker, a diplomatist, an artificer, a caster of bells, a worker in gold and silver; he carries on fisheries; he is a merchant; he builds ships; he founds trade-guilds – he is as far removed from the fierce warrior who leaped ashore at Thanet as the Romano-Briton whom he conquered was removed from the naked savage who opposed the arms of Cæsar.

The difference is chiefly due to his conversion. This has brought him under the influence of Rome Ecclesiastic. It has educated him, turned him into a townsman, and made growth possible for him. No growth is possible for any race until it first accepts the creed of civilization.

London was converted in A.D. 604. This was a hasty and incomplete conversion, executed to order; for the citizens speedily relapsed. Then they were again converted, and in sober earnest put away their old gods, keeping only a few of the more favorite superstitions; some of these remain still with us. They were so thoroughly converted that the city of London become a veritable mother of saints. There was the venerable Erkenwald, saint and bishop, he who built Bishopsgate on the site of the old Roman gate. There was St. Ethelburga, the wife of Sebert, the first Christian king; her church still stands, though not the earliest building, close beside the site of the old gate. There was St. Osyth, queen and martyr, the mother of King Offa; her name also survives in Size, or St. Osyth's, Lane, but the Church of St. Osyth was rededicated to St. Ben'et Sherehog (Benedict Skin-the-Pig); you may see the little old church-yard still, black and grimy, surrounded on three sides by tall houses. English piety loved to dedicate churches to English saints – more likely these than Italian or French – to look after the national interests. Thus there were in London churches dedicated to St. Dunstan, St. Swithin, St. Botolph (whose affection for the citizens was so well known that it was recognized by four churches), St. Edmund the Martyr, and, later on, when the Danes got their turn, churches to St. Olaf and St. Magnus.

The Englishman, thus converted, was received into the company of civilized nations. Scholars came across the Channel to teach him Latin, monks came to teach him the life of self-sacrifice, obedience, submission, and abstinence. The monastery reared its humble walls everywhere; the first foundation of the first bishop of London was a monastery. In times of war between the kinglets – when were there no wars? – the monasteries, after the whole country had been converted, were spared. Therefore the people settled around them, and enjoyed their protection. The monastery towns grew rapidly and prospered. New arts were introduced and taught by the monks, new ideas sprang up among the people, new wants were created. Moreover, intercourse began with other nations – the ecclesiastic who journeyed to Rome took with him a goodly troop of priests, monks, and laymen; they saw strange lands and observed strange customs. Some of them learned foreign languages, and even made friendships with the men who spoke them, discovering that a man who speaks another tongue is not necessarily an enemy. The Englishman was changed; yet he remained still, as he always does, whether he creates a new empire in America, or one in Australia, always an Englishman.

Meantime the kinglets made war with each other, and London became a prize for each in turn. It passed from the East Saxon to the Northumbrian, to the Mercian, to the West Saxon, as the hegemony passed from one to the other. Each kinglet learned more and more to recognize its importance and its value. One of the oldest civic documents extant is a grant of King Ethelbald to the Bishop of Rochester. He gives him the right of passing one ship of his own, or of another's, free of toll into the port of London. The toll of incoming and outgoing vessels formed, therefore, part of the royal revenue.

The history of London between A.D. 600 and the Norman Conquest is the history of England. How the City fell into the hands of the Danes, how it was finally secured by Alfred, how the Danes again obtained the City without fighting, and how the Norman was received in peace, belong to history. All this time London was steadily growing. Whatever king sat on the throne, her trade increased, and her wealth.

The buildings, till long after the Norman Conquest, were small and mean: the better houses were timber frames, with shutters or lattices, but no glass for the windows; the poorer houses were of wattle and daub. The churches were numerous and small. Some of them were still of wood, though a few were built of stone, with the simple circular arch. The first church of St. Paul's was destroyed by fire, a fate which awaited the second and the third. By the time of Edward the Confessor the second church was completed; but of this church we have no record whatever. The Saxon period, as concerns London, is the darkest of any. You may see at the Guildhall nearly everything that remains of Roman London. But there is nothing, absolutely not one single stone, to illustrate Saxon London. The city which grew up over the deserted Augusta and flourished for four hundred years has entirely disappeared. Nothing is left of it at all. The chief destroyer of Saxon London was the great fire of 1135, which swept London from end to end as effectually as that of 1666. Had it not been for these two fires, we should very likely have still standing one or two of the sturdy little Saxon churches of which the country yet affords one surviving example. Yet London is not alone in having no monuments of this period. If we take any other town, what remains in it of the years A.D. 600-1000? What is left in Rome to mark the reigns of the eighty Popes who fill that period? What in Paris to illustrate the rule of the Carlovingians? Fire and the piety of successive generations have destroyed all the buildings.

For outside show the city of Edward the Confessor and that of the second Henry were very nearly the same, and so may be treated together. The churches burned down in 1135 were rebuilt in stone, but the houses presented much the same appearance. Now, everybody who speaks of Norman London must needs speak of William Fitz Stephen. He is our only authority; all that we can do is to make commentaries and guesses based on the text of Fitz Stephen.

He was a clerk in the service of Thomas à Becket; he was present at the archbishop's murder; he wrote a Life of the saint, to which he prefixed, by happy inspiration, a brief eulogy of the City of London. It is far too brief, but it contains facts of the most priceless importance. London, we learn, possessed, besides its great cathedral, thirteen large conventual churches and one hundred and twenty-six parish churches. The White Tower was already built on the east side; the walls of the City, now kept in good repair, encircled it on all sides except the river; here the wall which had formerly defended the river front had been taken down to make way for warehouses and quays; the Royal Palace stood without the City, but connected with it by a populous suburb. Those who lived "in the suburbs" – that is, about Chancery Lane and Holborn – had spacious and beautiful gardens; there were also on this side pasture and meadow lands, with streams and water-mills; beyond the pastures was a great forest filled with wild creatures; many springs of water rose on the north side. The City was so populous that of those who went out to a muster, 20,000 were chosen as horsemen and 60,000 for the foot. We will discuss the question of population later on. Meantime one may remark that a force of 80,000 always ready to be called out means a population of 320,000 at least, which is indeed absurd, especially when we consider that the population of London, as shown by the poll-tax of Richard II., was only about 40,000.

There were three principal schools, but sometimes other schools were opened "by favor and permission." We are not told what schools these were; but there was always a school of some kind attached to every monastery and nunnery. The boys were taught Latin verse, grammar, and rhetoric; they disputed with each other in the churches on feast-days, especially about the "principles of grammar, and the rules of the past and future tenses" – truly, an agreeable pastime.

The different trades of the City were allotted their own places of work and sale. Fitz Stephen does not name the various quarters, but they can be easily ascertained from Stow, though the place assigned to each was sometimes changed. Thus, the chief market and trading-place of the City was always Cheap, a broad, open place with booths and sheds for the exposure of wares, on the north and south. The names of the streets leading out of Cheap indicate the trades that were carried on in them. The streets called Wood, Milk, Iron, Honey, Poultry, mark the site of certain markets on the north. Those named after Bread, Candles, Soap, Fish, Money-changing, are shown on the south. Along the rivers were breweries, of which one remains to this day; artificers of various kinds were gathered together in their own streets about the town. This custom of congregation was useful in more ways than one: it gave dignity to the craft and inspired self-respect for the craftsmen, it kept up the standard of good work, it made craftsmen regard each other as brethren, not as enemies; it gave them guilds, of which our trades-unions, which think of nothing but wages, are the degenerate successors; and it brought each trade under the salutary rule of the Church.

There was then – there has always been – a great plenty of food in the city of London; on the river-bank, among the vintners, there were eating-houses where at all times of the day and every day there were cooked and sold meat and fish and every kind of food. Once a week, on Friday, there was a horse-fair in Smithfield without the walls; at this fair there were races every week.

The young men of the City were greatly addicted to sports of all kinds: they skated in winter, they tilted on the water and on land, they fought, wrestled, practised archery, danced, and sang. They were a turbulent, courageous, free and independent youth, proud of their city and its wealth, proud of their power and their freedom, proud of the trade which came to their quays from every part of the world. What says Fitz Stephen?

"Aurum mittit Arabs: species et thura Sabæus:
Arma Scythes: oleum palmarum divite sylva
Pingue solum Babylon: Nilus lapides pretiosos:
Norwegi, Russi, varium grisum, sabelinas:
Seres, purpureas vestes: Galli, sua vina."

The good cleric is a little mixed in his geography. The Arabs certainly had no gold to send; the Sabæans were, however, Arabs of Saba, in Arabia Felix: they sent myrrh and frankincense; spices came from another country. Why does he assign arms to the Scythians? Egypt had turquoise mines, but no other precious stones. The purple garments of the Seres, or Chinaman, are silks. Norway and Russia still send sables and other furs, and France, happily, still sends claret.

The city (Fitz Stephen adds), like Rome, is divided into wards, has annual sheriffs for its consuls, has senatorial and lower magistrates, sewers and aqueducts in its streets – its proper places and separate courts for cases of each kind, deliberative, demonstrative, judicial – and has assemblies on appointed days. I do not think there is a city with more commendable customs of church attendance, honor to God's ordinances, keeping sacred festivals, almsgiving, hospitality, confirming betrothals, contracting marriages, celebration of nuptials, preparing feasts, cheering the guests, and also in care for funerals and the interment of the dead. The only pests of London are the immoderate drinking of fools, and the frequency of fires. To this may be added that nearly all the Bishops, Abbots, and Magnates of England are, as it were, citizens and freemen of London, having their own splendid houses to which they resort, where they spend largely when summoned to great Councils by the King or by their Metropolitan, or drawn thither by their own private affairs.

A noble picture of a noble city!

Let us consider the monuments of the City. There remains of Saxon London nothing. Of Norman London, the great White Tower, the crypt of Bow, the crypt of St. John's Priory (outside the City), part of the church of Bartholomew the Great, part of St. Ethelburga's, Bishopsgate; there is nothing more.²

The cathedral of St. Paul's when Fitz Stephen wrote was slowly rising from its ashes. It had been already twice destroyed by fire. First, the church founded by Mellitus and beautified by Bishop Cedd and King Sebbi was burned to the ground in the year 961. We know nothing at all of this building or of its successor, which was destroyed in the year 1086. Bishop Maurice began to rebuild the church in the following year, but it was two hundred years before it was completed. This cathedral therefore belongs to a later period. That which was destroyed in 1084 must have resembled in its round arches and thick pillars the cathedral of Durham.

The church and the various buildings which belonged to it in the reign of Henry I. were surrounded by a wall. This wall included the whole area now known as St. Paul's Church-yard, and as far as Paternoster Row on the north side. There were six gates to the wall; the sites of two are preserved in the names of St. Paul's Alley and Paul's Chain. The Bishop's Palace was on the north-west corner; the chapter-house was on the south side of the church; on the north was a charnel-house and a chapel over it; close beside this was a small enclosure called Pardon Church-yard, where a chapel was founded by Gilbert à Becket, the saint's father. This enclosure was afterwards converted into a beautiful cloister, painted with a Dance of Death, called the Dance of St. Paul's. Close beside Pardon Church-yard was the chapel of Jesus, serving for the parish church of St. Faith until the chapel was destroyed, when the parish obtained the crypt for its church. St. Faith's is now coupled with St. Augustine's.

Of the thirteen large conventual churches mentioned by Fitz Stephen, we may draw up a tolerably complete list: St. Martin-le-Grand, St. Katherine's by the Tower, St. Mary Overies, Holy Trinity Priory, St. Bartholomew's Priory, St. Giles's Hospital, St. Mary of Bethlehem, the priory of St. John of Jerusalem, the nunnery afterwards turned into Elsing's Spital, the nunnery of St. John Baptist, Hollywell, the nunnery of Clerkenwell, the new Temple in Fleet Street, and the old Temple in Holborn, perhaps make up the thirteen. I cannot believe that Fitz Stephen could have included either Barking Abbey or Merton Abbey in his list.

The most ancient monastic foundation, next to that of St. Paul's, was St. Martin's House or College. Why St. Martin was so popular in this country, which had so many saints of her own, is not easily intelligible. Perhaps the story of the partition of the cloak at the gate of Amiens, while the saint was still a soldier, struck the imagination of the people. Certainly the saint's austerities at Ligujé would not attract the world. In London alone there were the church of St. Martin's, Ludgate Hill, said to have been founded in very early Saxon times, that of St. Martin's Outwich, of St. Martin Orgar, St. Martin Pomary, and St. Martin Vintry – five parish churches to attest his sanctity and his popularity.

St. Martin-le-Grand, sanctuary and collegiate church, was a Liberty to itself. Here criminals found safety and could not be arrested, a privilege which lasted long after the dissolution of the religious houses. Among the deans of St. Martin's was William of Wykeham.

One church only of the whole thirteen still stands. Part of the present church of St. Bartholomew the Great is that actually built by Rahere, the first founder, in the beginning of the twelfth century.

The story of Rahere is interesting but incomplete, and involved in many difficulties. He is variously said to have been the king's minstrel, the king's jester, a knight of good family, and a man of low origin, who haunted great men's tables and made them laugh – nothing less than the comic person of the period, entirely given over to the pleasures of the world. In short, the customary profligate, who presently saw the error of his ways, and was converted. The last statement is quite possible, because, as is well known, there was at this time a considerable revival of religion. The story goes on to say that, being penitent, Rahere went on a pilgrimage. Nothing more likely. At this time, going on pilgrimage offered attractions irresistible to many men. It was a most agreeable way of proving one's repentance, showing a contrite heart, and procuring absolution. It also enabled the penitent to see the world, and to get a beneficial change of air, food, and friends. There were dangers on the way: they lent excitement to the journey; robbers waylaid those of the pilgrims who had any money; fevers struck them low; if they marched through the lands of the infidel, they were often attacked and stripped, if not slain; the plains of Asia Minor were white with the bones of those cut off on their way to the Holy Land. But think of the joy, to one of an inquiring and curious mind who had never before been beyond sight of the gray old London walls, to be travelling in a country where everything was new – the speech, the food, the wine, the customs, the dress – with a goodly company, the length of the road beguiled by pleasant talk! Everybody pilgrimized who could, even the poorest and the lowest. The poorest could go as well as the richest, because the pilgrim wanted no money – he would start upon his tramp with an empty scrip. Such an one had naught to lose, and feared no robbers; he received bed and supper every night at some monastery, and was despatched in the morning after a solid breakfast. When he at length arrived at the shrine for which he was bound, he repeated the prayers ordered, performed the necessary crawlings, and heard the necessary masses; he then returned home, his soul purified, his sins forgiven, his salvation assured, and his memory charged with good stories for the rest of his life. The English pilgrim fared sometimes to Walsingham, sometimes to Canterbury, sometimes farther afield. He journeyed on foot through France and Italy to Rome; he even tramped all across Europe and Asia Minor, if he could be received in some great company guarded by the knights of St. John to the Holy Land. The roads in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were covered with pilgrims; the Mediterranean was black with ships going from Marseilles, from Genoa, from Naples, to the port of St. Jean d'Acre. Even the rustic, discovering that he, too, simple and unlettered as he was, had a soul to be saved, and that it would be better not to trust altogether to the last offices of the parish priest, threw down his spade, deserted his wife and his children, and went off on pilgrimage. At last the bishops interfered, and enjoined that no one should be considered and received as a pilgrim who could not produce an episcopal license. It was no longer enough for a man to get repentance in order to get the run of the road and of his teeth; and, since the episcopal license was not granted to everybody, the rustics had to fall back on what the parish church afforded, and have ever since been contented with her advice and authority.

There was an Office of Pilgrims, which was to be rendered in the following fashion:

Two of the second stall, who may be put in the table at the pleasure of the writer, shall be clothed in a Tunic, with copes above, carrying staves across, and scrips in the manner of Pilgrims; and they shall have cappelli³ over their heads, and be bearded. Let them go from the Vestiary, singing a hymn, "Jesus, our redemption," advancing with a slow step, through the right aisle of the Church, as far as the Western gates, and there stopping, sing a hymn as far as that place, "You shall be satisfied with my likeness." Then a certain Priest of the higher stall, written in the table, clothed in an Alb and Amess, barefooted, carrying a cross upon his right shoulder, with a look cast downward, coming to them through the right aisle of the Church, shall suddenly stand between them, and say, "What are these discourses?" The Pilgrims, as it were, admiring and looking upon him, shall say, "Are you a stranger?" etc. The Priest shall answer, "In what city?" The Pilgrims shall answer, "Of Jesus of Nazareth." The Priest, looking upon both of them, shall say, "O fools, and slow of heart," which being said, the Priest immediately shall retire, and pretend to be going farther; but the Pilgrims hurrying up, and following him, shall detain him, as it were, inviting him to their inn, and drawing him with their staves, shall show him a castle and say, "Stay with us." And so singing they shall lead him as far as a tent in the middle of the nave of the Church, made in the resemblance of the Castle Emmaus. When they have ascended thither, and sat at a table ready prepared, the Lord sitting between them shall break the bread; and being discovered by this means, shall suddenly retire, and vanish from their sight. But they, amazed as it were, rising, with their countenances turned to each other, shall sing lamentably "Alleluia," with the verse, "Did not our heart burn," etc., which being renewed, turning themselves towards the stall, they shall sing this verse, "Tell us, Mary." Then a certain person of the higher stall, clothed in a Dalmatick and Amess, and bound round in the manner of a woman, shall answer, "The Sepulchre of Christ; the Angels are witnesses." Then he shall extend and unfold a cloth from one part, instead of clothes, and throw it before the great gate of the Choir. Afterwards he shall say, "Christ is risen." The Choir shall sing two other verses, following, and then the Master shall go within; a procession be made; and Vespers be ended.⁴

There was also a Consecration of Pilgrims, as follows:

The Pilgrims first confessed all their sins, after which they lay prostrate before the Altar. Particular prayers and psalms were then said over them, and after every psalm (with manifest skilful appropriation) the Gloria Patri; the Psalm, Ad te, Domine, levavi; and the Miserere. At the end of these, the Pilgrims arose from their prostrate position, and the Priest consecrated their scrips and staves, saying, "The Lord be with you," and "let us pray," etc. He next sprinkled holy water upon their scrips and staves, and placed the scrip around the neck of each pilgrim, with other religious services. Afterwards he delivered to them the staff with similar prayers. If any of the Pilgrims were going to Jerusalem, their garments were in readiness, marked with the cross, and the crosses were consecrated, and holy water sprinkled over them. The garments and crosses were then delivered to the Pilgrims, accompanied by appropriate prayers. The service concluded with the Mass De Iter Agentibus.⁵

Rahere, therefore, among the rest, pilgrimized to Rome. Now it happened that on the way, either going or returning, he fell grievously sick and was like to die. As medical science in those days commanded but small confidence, men naturally turned to the saints, and besieged them with petitions for renewed health. Rahere betook himself to St. Bartholomew, to whom he promised a hospital for poor men should he recover. Most fortunately for London, St. Bartholomew graciously accepted the proposal, and cured the pilgrim. Rahere therefore returned: he chose the site, and was about to build the hospital, when the saint appeared to him and ordered him to found, as well, a church. Rahere promised. He even went beyond his promise: he founded his hospital of St. Bartholomew, which still exists, a perennial fountain of life and health, and, besides this, a priory for canons regular, and a church for the priory. The church still stands, one of the most noble monuments in London. One Alfune, who had founded the church of St. Giles Cripplegate, became the first Hospitaller, going every day to the shambles to beg for meat for the sick poor. Rahere became the first prior of his own foundation, and now lies buried in his church within a splendid tomb called after his name, but of fifteenth-century work.

The mysterious part of the story is how Rahere, a simple gentleman, if not a jester, was able to raise this splendid structure and to found so noble a hospital. For, even supposing the hospital and priory to have been at first small and insignificant, the church itself remains, a monument of lavish and pious beneficence. The story, in order to account for the building of so great a church, goes off into a drivelling account of how Rahere feigned to be a simple idiot.

A great many people every year visit this noble church, now partly restored. Very few of them take the trouble to step round to the back of the church. Yet there are one or two things worth noting in that nest of low courts and squalid streets. Cloth Fair, for instance, still possesses a few of its old timbered and gabled houses. But on the other side a small portion of the old monastery church-yard yet remains, and, in a row of two or three cottages, each with a tiny garden in front: a cottage-garden close to Smithfield – survives a memory of the garden which once stretched over this monastery court.

Some of the other foundations enumerated were only recently founded when Fitz Stephen wrote, and rightly belong to Plantagenet London. But the noble foundation of the Holy Trinity, Aldgate, was due to Matilda, queen of Henry I., who also founded St. Giles's Hospital, beside St. Giles-in-the-Fields. And the priory of St. John of Jerusalem, the chief seat in England of the Knights Hospitallers, was founded in the year 1100, by Jordan Briset, and Muriel, his wife.

St. Katherine's by the Tower was first founded by Matilda, wife of King Stephen. This, the most interesting of all the city foundations, has survived, in degraded form, to the present day. Its appearance when it was pulled down, sixty years ago, and as it is figured, was very much unlike the original foundation by Queen Matilda. Yet the life of this old place had been continuous. For seven hundred years it remained on the spot where it was first established. Matilda first founded St. Katherine's, as a hospitale pauperum, for the repose of the souls of her two children who died and were buried in the Holy Trinity Priory. It was to consist of thirteen members – "Brothers and Sisters." It was endowed with certain estates which the society, after this long lapse of time, still enjoys; the sisters had the right of voting at chapter meetings – a right which they still retain. The hospital was placed in the charge or custody of the prior of Holy Trinity. A hundred years later there was a dispute as to the meaning of the right of custody, which the priory maintained to be ownership. In the end Queen Eleanor obtained possession of the place, and greatly increased its wealth and dignity. Under her it consisted of a master, three brothers in orders, three sisters, and ten bedeswomen. They all lived in their college round the church of St. Katherine. Queen Philippa, another benefactor, further endowed the hospital, adding two chaplains and six poor scholars. Philippa's new charter, with the building of a splendid church, raised the hospital to a position far above the small foundation of poor men and women designed by Matilda. It now stood within its precinct of eleven acres, possessed of its own courts, spiritual and temporal, its own law officers, and even its own prison. Its good-fortune in being considered the private property of the Queen Consort caused it to escape the general suppression of the religious houses. It lived on – albeit a sleepy life – a centre of religion and education to the poor people among whom it was placed. It should have lived there till this day; it should have become the Westminster Abbey of East London; but greed of gain destroyed it. Its venerable buildings – its chapel, college, cloisters, and courts were all destroyed sixty years ago in order to construct on their site the docks called St. Katherine's, which were not wanted for the trade of the City. In order to construct docks, in rivalry with other docks already established, this most precious monument of the past – the Abbey Church of East London – was ruthlessly destroyed. Who would believe such a thing? The dust and ashes of the nameless dead which filled its burying-yard were carried away and used to fill up certain old reservoirs, on the site of which were built streets and squares; and in Regent's Park they stuck up a new chapel, with half a dozen neat houses round it, and called that St. Katherine's by the Tower. Some day this foundation, with its income of £10,000 a year, must be sent back to East London, to which it belongs. Poor East London! It had one – only one – ancient and venerable foundation, and they have wantonly and uselessly destroyed it.

Everybody who visits London goes to see the Temple Church and the courts formerly trodden by the Templars, now echoing the hurried feet of lawyers and their clerks. Their beautiful church, however, is that of the new Temple. There was an older Temple than this. It stood at the north-east corner of Chancery Lane. It was certainly some kind of quadrangular college with its chapel, its hall, its courts, and its gardens. When the Templars moved to their new quarters, it passed into other hands and ceased to be a monastic place. Some of its buildings survived until the sixteenth century.

Is the legend of St. Mary Overies too well-known a story to be retold? Perhaps there are some readers who have not read the Chronicles of London Bridge, where it is narrated.

Long years ago, before there was any London Bridge at all, a ferry plied across the river between what is now Dowgate Dock and that now called St. Saviour's Dock – both of which exist untouched, save that the buildings round them are changed. At one time the ferry-master – he appears to have sat at home and taken the money while his servants tugged at the oar – was one Awdrey. There was no competition in the ferry trade of the time, so that this worthy employer of labor grew rich. As he became old, however, he fell into the vice common to rich men who are also old – that is to say, he became avaricious, covetous, and miserly; he suffered acutely from this failing, in so much that he grudged his servants their very food. This miser had a daughter, a lovely damsel named Mary, of whom many young knights became amorous. To one of these she lost her heart; and, as too commonly happens, to the poorest, a thing which her father could not countenance. The knight, therefore, not being able to get the consent of Awdrey père, removed to another place, guarding still the memory of his Mary, and still beloved by her. As there was no post in those days, and neither could write, they exchanged no letters, but they preserved their constancy and fidelity.

Now behold what may happen as a punishment for avarice! The old man one day, devising a way to save a few meals – for at a time when death is in the house who can think upon eating and drinking? – pretended that he was dead, and laid himself out with a white sheet over him. Alas! He was cruelly mistaken. His servants, learning what had happened, loudly and openly rejoiced, stripped the larder of all that it contained, set the casks flowing, opened the bottles, and began to feast and sing. It was more than the old man could endure. He sprang from his bed and rushed among them; they fled, shrieking, because they thought it was his ghost; one, bolder than the rest, stood his ground to face the ghost, and banged the apparition over the head with the butt-end of a broken oar, so that the unlucky ghost fell down dead in real earnest. What happened when they came to bury him may be read in the book above referred to.

The miser's fortune thereupon devolved upon his daughter. She immediately sent for her lover, who hastened to obey his mistress. Alas! on his way the unlucky knight was thrown from his horse and was killed. The girl, distracted by this misfortune, founded a convent of sisters at the south end of the ferry, and taking refuge in her own Foundation, retired from the world. Here in course of time she died. Later on, another pious lady changed the convent of sisters to a college of priests, and very early in the twelfth century two Norman knights, named Pont de l'Arche and D'Ansey, founded here a great priory, of which the present Church of St. Saviour was then the chapel. The Effigy of Pont de l'Arche (or perhaps it is that of his friend D'Ansey) is still to be seen, with no inscription upon it, in the church. The chancel, the two transepts, and the Ladye Chapel now remain of the old church with its later additions, and at this moment they are rebuilding the nave in something like the former style.

"There were in London," Fitz Stephen says, "a hundred and twenty-six parish churches besides the cathedral and conventual churches." Whatever the population may have been, the City has never, in her most crowded days, when nearly half a million lived within her walls, wanted more churches. A list of them may be found in Strype and Stow. Some of them – twenty-five, I think – were never rebuilt after the great fire. Many of them, in these days, have been wantonly and wickedly destroyed. Most of the churches were doubtless small and mean buildings. Fortunately, we are able to show, by the survival of one monument, what some of these little parish churches of London were like in the Saxon and early Norman times. There remains at Bradford-on-Avon, a little town of Wiltshire, a church still complete save for its south porch, built by St. Aldhelm in the eighth century. There are other partly Saxon and so-called Saxon remains. There is the most curious church of Greenstead in Essex, whose walls are trunks of oak-trees. Perhaps some of the London churches may have been built in the same way, but it is more probable that the piety of the parishioners made them of stone.⁶ The accompanying figure shows the Bradford church. It is very small; the plan shows the arrangement of nave, chancel, and north porch; it had a south porch, but that is gone. The walls are of thick stone; the nave is 25 feet 2 inches long, and 13 feet 2 inches broad; the chancel is 13 feet 2 inches long, and 10 feet broad. The height of the nave to the wall plates is 25 feet 3 inches; of the chancel is 18 feet. The chancel opens out from the nave, not with a broad arch, but with a narrow door only 2 feet 4 inches broad – a very curious arrangement. The doors of the south and north porches are of the same breadth. The church must have been very dark, but, then, windows in a cold climate, if you have no glass, must be as small in size and as few in number as possible. It was lit by a small window in the eastern wall of the north porch, no doubt by another in the south porch, by a small window in the south wall of the nave near the chancel, and by a fourth small window in the south wall of the chancel, so placed that the light, and sometimes the sun, should fall upon the altar during celebration of mass. The church was thus imperfectly lit by four small windows, each with its round arch. The people knelt on the stones; there were no chairs or benches for them; the bareness of the church at the present day is just what it was at first. There is no tower. Over the chancel arch are sculptured two angels. Outside the church, at the height of about ten feet, runs a course of round arcades, the only ornament, unless the remains of some engaged pilasters on the inner door of the north porch be counted as ornament. A little new masonry has been added within, and two new windows have been cut in the northern wall for the purpose of giving more light. But with these exceptions the church is exactly as it was when Aldhelm reared it and dedicated it to St. Laurence. I do not say that this little church represents all the Saxon parish churches of London, but we may be sure that it represents some, and we know that many of them, even after they had been rebuilt in the twelfth century, and after mediæval piety had beautified and decorated them, remained mean and small. In the matter of Saxon churches we have perhaps fewer existing specimens than we have of the earlier British churches. The Church of St. Mary at Dover, built of Roman bricks and cement; part of St. Martin's, Canterbury; and the little Cornish Church of Perranazabuloe belong to that earlier period. But the Church of St. Laurence, in the pretty old town of Bradford-on-Avon, is, according to Professor E. A. Freeman, the one surviving old English church in the land.

It is impossible to assign a date for the foundation of these churches, but their dedication in many cases affords a limit of period before which they could not have been built. Thus, there are three churches in London named after St. Olave. This king, canonized because, with much good feeling, he left off attacking the English, died at the end of the tenth century. These churches were therefore erected in or after the reign of Edward the Confessor. There are two named after Dunstan, which gives us a limit to their dates. They were built between the canonization of Dunstan and the Norman Conquest, because after the conquest there were no new churches consecrated to Saxon saints. The dedication of St. Alban's may possibly mark the site of a church of Roman time, as may also that of St. Helen's, named after Helena, mother of Constantine. But I have given reasons for believing that everything Roman perished and was forgotten. The churches of St. Botolph, St. Swithin, St. Osyth, St. Ethelburga, already mentioned, indicate a Saxon foundation. St. Alphege was murdered in 1012, so that his church must have been built between 1012 and 1066. One or two dedications are obscure. Why, for instance, was a church dedicated to St. Vedast? He was a bishop of Arras, who, in the sixth century, confirmed his flock in the faith by a series of miracles quite novel and startling. But who brought the fame of Vedast and the history of his miracles to the heart of London City? Traditionally, the two oldest churches in London are those of St. Peter, Cornhill, which claims a Roman origin, and St. Martin's, Ludgate Hill, which is assigned to a certain British Prince Cadwallo. Both traditions may be neglected. In the oldest part of the City, that along the river, the churches, as I have already mentioned, are mostly dedicated to the Apostles. Besides the churches, all the monuments the City had then to show were its wall, its Great Tower, one or two smaller towers, and its Bridge.

The original building of the bridge cannot be discovered. As long as we know anything of London, the bridge was there. For a long time it was a bridge of timber, provided with a fortified gate – one of the gates of the City. In the year 1091 the Chronicler relates that on the Feast of St. Edmund, the Archbishop, at hour of six, a dreadful whirlwind from the south-east, coming from Africa – thus do authors in all ages seize upon the opportunity of parading their knowledge – "from Africa!" all that way! – blew upon the City, and overwhelmed upwards of six hundred houses and several churches, greatly damaged the Tower, and tore away the roof and part of the wall of St. Mary le Bow, in Cheapside. During the same storm the water in the Thames rose with such rapidity and increased so violently that London Bridge was entirely swept away.

The bridge was rebuilt. Two years afterwards it narrowly escaped destruction when a great part of the City was destroyed by fire. Forty years later it did meet this fate in the still greater fire of 1135. It was immediately rebuilt, but I suppose hurriedly, because thirty years later it had to be constructed anew.

Among the clergy of London was then living one Peter, chaplain of a small church in the Poultry – where Thomas à Becket was baptized – called Colechurch. This man was above all others skilled in the craft and mystery of bridge-building. He was perhaps a member of the fraternity called the Pontific (or Bridge-building) Brothers, who about this time built the famous bridges at Avignon, Pont St. Esprit, Cahors, Saintes, and La Rochelle. He proposed to build a stone bridge over the river. In order to raise money for this great enterprise, offerings were asked and contributed by king, citizens, and even the country at large. The list of contributors was written out on a table for posterity, and preserved in the Bridge Chapel.

This bridge, which was to last for six hundred and fifty years, took as long to build as King Solomon's Temple, namely, three-and-thirty years. Before it was finished the architect lay in his grave. When it was completed, the bridge was 926 feet long, and 40 feet wide – Stow says 30 feet; it stood 60 feet above high water; it contained a drawbridge and 19 pointed arches, with massive piers, varying from 25 to 34 feet in solidity, raised upon strong elm piles, covered with thick planks. The bridge was curiously irregular; there was no uniformity in the breadth of the arches; they varied from 10 feet to 32 feet. Over the tenth and longest pier was erected a chapel, dedicated to the youngest saint in the calendar, St. Thomas of Canterbury. The erection of a chapel on a bridge was by no means uncommon. Everybody, for instance, who has been in the South of France remembers the double chapel on the broken bridge at Avignon. Again, a chapel was built on the bridge at Droitwich, in Cheshire, and one on the bridge at Wakefield, in Yorkshire. Like the chapel at Avignon, that of London Bridge contained an upper and a lower chapel; the latter was built in the pier with stairs, making it accessible from the river. The bridge gate at the southern end was fortified by a double tower, and there was also a tower at the northern end. The wall, or parapet of the bridge, followed the line of the piers, so as to give at every pier additional room. The same arrangement used to be seen on the old bridge at Putney. The maintenance of this important edifice was in the hands of the Brethren of St. Thomas of the Bridge.

To build a bridge was ever accounted a good work. Witness the lines engraved on the bridge of Culham:

Off alle werkys in this world that ever were wrought
Holy Churche is chefe —

Another blessid besines is brigges to make,
When that the pepul may not passe after greet showers,
Dole it is to drawe a dead body out of a lake,
That was fulled in a fount ston and a felow of oures.

The citizens have always regarded London Bridge with peculiar pride and affection. There was no other bridge like it in the whole country, nor any which could compare with it for strength or for size. I think, indeed, that there was not in the whole of Europe any bridge that could compare with it; for it was built not only over a broad river, but a tidal river, up which the flood rose and ebbed with great vehemence twice a day. Later on they built houses on either side, but at first the way was clear. The bridge was endowed with broad lands; certain monks, called Brethren of St. Thomas on the Bridge, were charged with the services in the chapel, and with administering the revenues for the maintenance of the fabric.

The children made songs about it. One of their songs to which they danced taking hands has been preserved. It is modernized, and one knows not how old it is. The author of Chronicles of London Bridge gives it at full length, with the music. Here are two or three verses:

London Bridge is broken down,
Dance over my Lady Lee;
London Bridge is broken down,
With a gay ladee.

How shall we build it up again?
Dance over my Lady Lee;
How shall we build it up again?
With a gay ladee.

Build it up with stone so strong,
Dance over my Lady Lee;
Huzza! 'twill last for ages long,
With a gay ladee.

The City wall, repaired by Alfred, was not allowed to fall into decay again for the next seven hundred years. A recent discovery proves that the ditch was more ancient than had been thought. But by the time of King John it was greatly decayed and stopped up; in his reign a grand restoration of the ditch was made by the citizens. Many fragments of the wall have been discovered dotted along its course, which is now accurately known, and can be traced. One of the City churches has a piece of the wall itself under its north wall. In the church-yard of St. Alphege there remains a fragment; in the church-yard of St. Giles there is a bastion. To repair the wall they seem to have used any materials that offered. Witness the collection of capitals and pilasters found in a piece of the City wall, and preserved in the Guildhall. Witness, also, the story of King John, who, when he wanted stones for repairing the gates, broke down the stone-houses of the Jews, robbed their coffers, and used the stones for his repairs. When Lud Gate was pulled down some of these stones, with Hebrew inscriptions, were found, but I believe were all thrown into the Thames at London Bridge.

The Tower of London, until William Longchamp, A.D. 1190, enclosed it with a wall and a deep ditch, consisted of nothing but the great White Tower, with its halls and its chapel of St. John. At the western end of the wall, where is now Ludgate Hill Railway Station, stood a smaller tower called Montfichet. On the opposite bank of the Fleet stood a stronghold, which afterwards became Bridewell Palace, and covered the whole site of the broad street which now follows the approach to Blackfriars Bridge. The site of Tower Royal is preserved in the street of that name. King Stephen lodged there. It was afterwards given to the Crown, and called the Queen's Wardrobe. And there was another tower in Bucklersbury called Sernes Tower, of which no trace remains.

Of great houses there were as yet but few – Blackwell Hall, if it then stood, would be called Bassing Hall – Aldermanbury, the predecessor of Guildhall, was built by this time; and we hear of certain great men having houses in the City – Earl Ferrars in Lombard Street next to Allhallows and Pont de l'Arche in Elbow Lane, Dowgate Ward, what time Henry the First was King.

The water supply of the City until the later years of the thirteenth century was furnished by the Walbrook, the Wells or Fleet rivers, and the springs or fountains outside the walls, of which Stow enumerates a great many. I suppose that the two streams very early became choked and fouled and unfit for drinking. But the conduits and "Bosses" of water were not commenced till nearly the end of the thirteenth century. Water-carts carried round fresh water, bringing it into the town from the springs and wells on the north. One does not find, however, any period in the history of London when the citizens desired plain cold water as a beverage. Beer was always the national drink; they drank small ale for breakfast, dinner, and supper; when they could get it they drank strong ale. Of water for washing there was not at this period so great a demand as at present. At the same time it is not true to say, as was said a few years ago in the House of Commons, that for eight hundred years our people did not wash themselves. All through the Middle Ages the use of the hot bath was not only common, but frequent, and in the case of the better classes was almost a necessity of life.

The population of this busy city is tolerably easy to calculate. The astounding statement of the good Fitz Stephen that London could turn out an army of 20,000 horse and 60,000 foot, must of course, be dismissed without argument. Some minds are wholly incapable of understanding numbers. Perhaps Fitz Stephen had such a mind. Perhaps in writing the numerals the numbers got multiplied by ten – Roman numerals are hard to manage. If we assume an average of 400 for each parish church, which, considering that the church was used daily by the people, seems not too little, we get a population of about 50,000. In the time of Richard's poll tax, 300 years later, the population was about 40,000. But then the City had been ravaged by a succession of plagues.

The strength of the town and the power of the citizens is abundantly proved by the chronicles. In the year 994, Aulaf and Swegen came to fight against London with ninety-four ships; but "they there sustained more harm and evil than they ever imagined that any townsmen would be able to do unto them." Early in the eleventh century the Londoners beat off the Danes again and again. Nor did the citizens abandon their king until he abandoned them. Later on, Edmund Etheling had to abandon his enterprise against Cnut, because the Londoners would not join him. Then there is the story about the body of the murdered Alphege, Archbishop of Canterbury. This had been deposited in St. Paul's Cathedral. Agelnoth, successor to Alphege, begged the body of Cnut for Canterbury. Cnut granted the request, but was afraid – timebat civium interruptiones – to take away the body except by stealth. He therefore caused his huscarles, or household soldiers, to disperse themselves, and to raise tumults at the gates and elsewhere. While the citizens were running everywhere to enjoy a share in the fight, the body was carried to the river and placed in a boat, which was rowed in all haste down the river. The townsmen sent out a party in pursuit. And, as everybody knows, William the Norman found it politic or necessary to confirm the liberties and laws of London.

The house, either in Saxon and Norman time, presented no kind of resemblance to the Roman villa. It had no cloisters, no hypocaust, no suite or sequence of rooms. This unlikeness is another proof, if any were wanting, that the continuity of tenure had been wholly broken. If the Saxons went into London, as has been suggested, peaceably, and left the people to carry on their old life and their trade in their own way, the Roman and British architecture, no new thing, but a style grown up in course of years and found fitted to the climate, would certainly have remained. That, however, was not the case. The Englishman developed his house from the patriarchal idea. First, there was the common hall; in this the household lived, fed, transacted business, and made their cheer in the evenings. It was built of timber, and to keep out the cold draughts it was afterwards lined with tapestry. At first they used simple cloths, which in great houses were embroidered and painted; perches of various kinds were affixed to the walls whereon the weapons, the musical instruments, the cloaks, etc., were hung up. The lord and lady sat on a high seat: not, I am inclined to think, on a dais at the end of the hall, which would have been cold for them, but on a great chair near the fire, which was burning in the middle of the hall. This fashion long continued. I have myself seen a college hall warmed by a fire in a brazier burning under the lantern of the hall. The furniture consisted of benches; the table was laid on trestles, spread with a white cloth, and removed after dinner; the hall was open to all who came, on condition that the guest should leave his weapons at the door. The floor was covered with reeds, which made a clean, soft, and warm carpet, on which the company could, if they pleased, lie round the fire. They had carpets or rugs also, but reeds were commonly used. The traveller who chances to find himself at the ancient and most interesting town of Kingston-on-Hull, which very few English people, and still fewer Americans, have the curiosity to explore, should visit the Trinity House. There, among many interesting things, he will find a hall where reeds are still spread, but no longer so thickly as to form a complete carpet. I believe this to be the last survival of the reed carpet. The times of meals were: the breakfast at about nine; the "noon-meat," or dinner, at twelve; and the "even-meat," or supper, probably at a movable time, depending on the length of the day. When lighting was costly and candles were scarce, the hours of sleep would be naturally longer in winter than in the summer. In their manner of living the Saxons were fond of vegetables, especially of the leek, onion, and garlic. Beans they also had (these were introduced probably at the time when they commenced intercourse with the outer world), pease, radishes, turnips, parsley, mint, sage, cress, rue, and other herbs. They had nearly all our modern fruits, though many show by their names, which are Latin or Norman, a later introduction. They made use of butter, honey, and cheese. They drank ale and mead. The latter is still made, but in small quantities, in Somerset and Hereford shires. The Normans brought over the custom of drinking wine.

In the earliest times the whole family slept in the common hall. The first improvement was the erection of the solar, or upper, chamber. This was above the hall, or a portion of it, or over the kitchen and buttery attached to the hall. The arrangement may be still observed in many of the old colleges of Oxford or Cambridge. The solar was first the sleeping-room of the lord and lady: though afterwards it served not only this purpose, but also for an ante-chamber to the dormitory of the daughters and the maid-servants. The men of the household still slept in the hall below. Later on, bed recesses were contrived in the wall, as one may find in Northumberland at the present day. The bed was commonly, but not for the ladies of the house, merely a big bag stuffed with straw. A sheet wrapped round the body formed the only night-dress. But there were also pillows, blankets, and coverlets. The early English bed was quite as luxurious as any that followed after, until the invention of the spring-mattress gave a new and hitherto unhoped-for joy to the hours of night.

The second step in advance was the ladies' bower, a room or suite of rooms set apart for the ladies of the house and their women. For the first time, as soon as this room was added, the women could follow their own avocations of embroidery, spinning, and needle-work of all kinds apart from the rough and noisy talk of the men.

The main features, therefore, of every great house, whether in town or country, from the seventh to the twelfth century, were the hall, the solar, built over the kitchen and buttery, and the ladies' bower.

There was also the garden. In all times the English have been fond of gardens. Bacon thought it not beneath his dignity to order the arrangement of a garden. Long before Bacon, a writer of the twelfth century describes a garden as it should be. "It should be adorned on this side with roses, lilies, and the marigold; on that side with parsley, cost, fennel, southernwood, coriander, sage, savery, hyssop, mint, vine, dettany, pellitory, lettuce, cresses, and the peony. Let there be beds enriched with onions, leeks, garlic, mellons, and scallions. The garden is also enriched by the cucumber, the soporiferous poppy, and the daffodil, and the acanthus. Nor let pot herbs be wanting, as beet-root, sorrel, and mallow. It is useful also to the gardener to have anice, mustard, and wormwood… A noble garden will give you medlars, quinces, the pear main, peaches, pears of St. Regle, pomegranates, citrons, oranges, almonds, dates, and figs." The latter fruits were perhaps attempted, but no one doubts their arriving at ripeness. Perhaps the writer sets down what he hoped would be some day achieved.

The in-door amusements of the time were very much like our own. We have a little music in the evening; so did our forefathers; we sometimes have a little dancing; so did they, but the dancing was done for them; we go to the theatres to see the mime; in their days the mime made his theatre in the great man's hall. He played the fiddle and the harp; he sang songs; he brought his daughter, who walked on her hands and executed astonishing capers; the gleeman, minstrels, or jongleur was already as disreputable as when we find him later on with his ribauderie. Again, we play chess; so did our ancestors; we gamble with dice; so did they; we feast and drink together; so did they; we pass the time in talk; so did they. In a word, as Alphonse Karr put it, the more we change, the more we remain the same.

Out-of-doors, as Fitz Stephen shows, the young men skated, wrestled, played ball, practised archery, held water tournaments, baited bull and bear, fought cocks, and rode races. They were also mustered sometimes for service in the field, and went forth cheerfully, being specially upheld by the reassuring consciousness that London was always on the winning side.

The growth of the city government belongs to the history of London. Suffice it here to say that the people in all times enjoyed a freedom far above that possessed by any other city of Europe. The history of municipal London is a history of continual struggle to maintain this freedom against all attacks, and to extend it and to make it impregnable. Already the people are proud, turbulent, and confident in their own strength. They refuse to own any over lord but the King himself; there is no Earl of London. They freely hold their free and open meetings – their Folk's mote – in the open space outside the north-west corner of St. Paul's Church-yard. That they lived roughly, enduring cold, sleeping in small houses in narrow courts; that they suffered much from the long darkness of winter; that they were always in danger of fevers, agues, "putrid" throats, plagues, fires by night, and civil wars; that they were ignorant of letters – three schools only for the whole of London – all this may very well be understood. But these things do not make men and women wretched. They were not always suffering from preventable disease; they were not always hauling their goods out of the flames; they were not always fighting. The first and most simple elements of human happiness are three, to wit: that a man should be in bodily health, that he should be free, that he should enjoy the produce of his own labor. All these things the Londoner possessed under the Norman kings nearly as much as in these days they can be possessed. His city has always been one of the healthiest in the world. Whatever freedom could be attained he enjoyed, and in that rich trading town all men who worked lived in plenty.

The households, the way of living, the occupations of the women, can be clearly made out in every detail from the Anglo-Saxon literature. The women in the country made the garments, carded the wool, sheared the sheep, washed the things, beat the flax, ground the corn, sat at the spinning-wheel, and prepared the food. In the towns they had no shearing to do, but all the rest of their duty fell to their province. The English women excelled in embroidery. "English" work meant the best kind of work. They worked church vestments with gold and pearls and precious stones. "Orfrey," or embroidery in gold, was a special art. Of course they are accused by the ecclesiastics of an overweening desire to wear finery; they certainly curled their hair, and, one is sorry to read, they painted, and thereby spoiled their pretty cheeks. If the man was the hlaf-ord – the owner or winner of the loaf – the wife was the hlaf-dig, its distributor; the servants and the retainers were hlaf-oetas, or eaters of it. When nunneries began to be founded, the Saxon ladies in great numbers forsook the world for the cloister. And here they began to learn Latin, and became able at least to carry on correspondence – specimens of which still exist – in that language. Every nunnery possessed a school for girls. They were taught to read and to write their own language and Latin, perhaps also rhetoric and embroidery. As the pious Sisters were fond of putting on violet chemises, tunics, and vests of delicate tissue, embroidered with silver and gold, and scarlet shoes, there was probably not much mortification of the flesh in the nunneries of the later Saxon times.

This for the better class. We cannot suppose that the daughters of the craftsmen became scholars of the Nunnery. Theirs were the lower walks – to spin the linen and to make the bread and carry on the house-work.

Let us walk into the narrow streets and see something more closely of the townfolk. We will take the close net-work of streets south of Paul's and the Cheapside, where the lanes slope down to the river. North of Chepe there are broad open spaces never yet built upon; south, every inch of ground is valuable. The narrow winding lanes are lined with houses on either side; they are for the most part houses with wooden fronts and roofs of timber. Here and there is a stone house; here and there the great house of a noble, or of a City baron, or a great merchant, as greatness is counted. But as yet the trade of London goes not farther than Antwerp, or Sluys, or Bordeaux at the farthest. Some of the houses stand in gardens, but in this part, where the population is densest, most of the gardens have become courts; and in the courts where the poorest live, those who are the porters and carriers, and lightermen and watermen – the servants of the Port – the houses are huts, not much better than those whose ruins may still be seen on Dartmoor; of four uprights, with wattle and clay for walls, and a thatched roof, and a fire burning on the floor in the middle. At the corners of the streets are laystalls, where everything is flung to rot and putrefy; the streets are like our country lanes, narrow and muddy; public opinion is against shooting rubbish into the street, but it is done; the people walk gingerly among the heaps of offal and refuse. In the wooden houses, standing with shutters and doors wide open all the year round, sit the men at work, each in his own trade, working for his own master; every man belongs to his guild, which is as yet religious. Here is a church, the Church of St. George, Botolph Lane; the doors are open; the bells are ringing; the people are crowding in. Let us enter. It is a Mystery that they are going to play – nothing less than the Raising of Lazarus according to Holy Scripture. The church within is dark and gloomy, but there is light enough to see the platform, or low stage, under the nave covered with red cloth, which has been erected for the Play. The actors are young priests and choristers. All round the stage stand the people, the men in leather jerkins – they do not remove their caps – the women in woollen frocks, the children with eyes wide open. When the Play begins they all weep without restraint at the moving passages. In the first scene Lazarus lies on his bed, at the point of death – weak, faint, speechless. He is attended by his friends – four Jews, attired in realistic fashion, no mistake about their nationality – infidels, mécréants – and by his sisters twain, marvellously like two nuns of the period. They send a messenger to the new Great Physician and Worker of Miracles, who is reported to be preaching and healing not far off. But He delays; Lazarus dies. His sister goes to reproach the Physician with the delay, wailing and lamenting her brother's death. At length He comes. Lazarus is already buried. The tomb is on the stage, with the dead man inside. Jesus calls. Oh, miracle! we saw him die; we saw him buried. Lo! he rises and comes forth from the grave. To the people it is as if the Lord Jesus himself stood before them; they have seen Him with their own eyes; henceforth the name of the Lord recalls a familiar form; experienced persons of dull imagination say that this is not Jesus at all, but Stephen the Deacon – he with the heavenly voice and the golden locks. No, no; it is not Stephen they have seen, but Another. So, also, some will have it that the man who died and was buried, and rose again, and stood before them all in white cerements, was John of Hoggesdon, Chantry Priest. Not so; it was Lazarus – none other. Lazarus, now no doubt a blessed saint, with his two sisters, Martha and Mary. Why! it must have been Lazarus, because, after the miracle, he called upon the people to mark the wondrous works of the Lord, and sang the Magnificat so that the psalm echoed in the roof and rolled above the pillars. He sang that psalm out of pure gratitude; you could see the tears rolling down his cheeks; and in worship and adoration, Lazarus himself, he who had been dead and had come to life again.

The Mystery is over; the people have all gone away; the stage is removed, and the church is empty again. Two priests are left, and their talk is like a jarring note after sweet music. "Brother," says one, "were it not for such shows as these, if we did not present to the people the things which belong to religion in such a way that the dullest can understand, the Church would be in a parlous way. All folk cry out upon the profligacy of the monks, and their luxury, and the greed of the priests. What sayeth Walter Map, that good archdeacon?

"'Omnis a clericis fluit enormitas,
Cum Deo debeant mentes sollicitas,
Tractant negotia mercesque vetitas
Et rerum turpium vices indebitas.'"

"I hear," said the other, "that two Cistercians have lately become apostate to the Jews."

"Rather," replied the first, "they should have become Christians, so to separate themselves the better from that accursed body."

These are the distant rumblings of the gathering storm. But the Church will become much richer, much more powerful, the monks will become much more profligate, the priests will become far more greedy before things grow to be intolerable.

It is an evening in May. What means this procession? Here comes a sturdy rogue marching along valiantly, blowing pipe and beating tabor. After him, a rabble rout of lads and young men, wearing flowers in their caps, and bearing branches and singing lustily. This is what they sing, not quite in these words, but very nearly:

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med,
And springth the wde nu.
Sing cuccu.

Awe bleteth after lamb,
Llouth after calve cu,
Bulluc sterteth, buck verteth,
Murie sing cuccu!

Cuccu, cuccu, well singeth thu cuccu,
Ne swik thu navu nu;
Sing cuccu, cuccu, nu sing cuccu,
Sing cuccu, sing cuccu, nu!

The workman jumps up and shouts as they go past; the priest and the friar laugh and shout; the girls, gathering together as is the maidens' way, laugh and clap their hands. The young men sing as they go and dance as they sing. Spring has come back again – sing cuckoo; the days of light and warmth – sing cuckoo; the time of feasting and of love – sing cuckoo. The proud abbot, with his following, draws rein to let them pass, and laughs to see them; he is, you see, a man first and a monk afterwards. In the gateway of his great house stands the Norman earl with his livery. He waits to let the London youth go by. The earl scorns the English youth no longer; he knows their lustihood. He can even understand their speech. He sends out largesse to the lads to be spent in the good wines of Gascony and of Spain; he joins in the singing; he waves his hand, a brotherly hand, as the floral greenery passes along; he sings with them at the top of his voice:

Sing cuccu – cuccu – nu sing cuccu;
Sing cuccu; sing cuccu, nu.

Presently the evening falls. It is light till past eight; the days are long. At nightfall, in summer, the people go to bed. In the great houses they assemble in the hall; in winter they would listen to music and the telling of stories, even the legends of King Arthur. Walter Map⁷ will collect them and arrange them, and the French romances, such as "Amis et Amils," "Aucassin et Nicolette," though these have not yet been written down. In summer they have music before they go to bed. We are in a city that has always been fond of music. The noise of crowd and pipe, tabor and cithern, is now silent in the streets. Rich men kept their own musicians. What said Bishop Grossetête?

Next hys chamber, besyde hys study,
Hys harper's chamber was fast ther by,
Many tymes, by nightes and dayes,
He hade solace of notes and layes.
One asked him the resun why
He hadde delyte in minstrelsy?
He answered hym on thys manere
Why he helde the harpe so dere:
The virtu of the harpe thurh skill and right
Wyll destrye the fendys myght,
And to the cros by gode skeyl
Ys the harpe lykened weyl.

He who looks and listens for the voice of the people in these ancient times hears no more than a confused murmur: one sees a swarm working like ants; a bell rings: they knock off work; another bell: they run together; they shout; they wave their hats; the listener, however, hears no words. It is difficult in any age – even in the present day – to learn or understand what the bas peuple think and what they desire. They want few things indeed in every generation; only, as I said above, the three elements of freedom, health, and just pay. Give them these three and they will grumble no longer. When a poet puts one of them on his stage and makes him act and makes him speak, we learn the multitude from the type. Later on, after Chaucer and Piers Ploughman have spoken, we know the people better; as yet we guess at them, we do not even know them in part. Observe, however, one thing about London – a thing of great significance. When there is a Jacquerie, when the people, who have hitherto been as silent as the patient ox, rise with a wild roar of rage, it is not in London. Here men have learned – however imperfectly – the lesson that only by combination of all for the general welfare is the common weal advanced. I think, also, that London men, even those on the lowest levels, have always known very well that their humility of place is due to their own lack of purpose and self-restraint. The air of London has always been charged with the traditions and histories of those who have raised themselves; there never has been a city more generous to her children, more ready to hold out a helping hand; this we shall see illustrated later on; at present all is beginning. The elementary three conditions are felt, but not yet put into words.

We are at present in the boyhood of a city which after a thousand years is still in its strong and vigorous manhood, showing no sign, not the least sign, of senility or decay. Rather does it appear like a city in its first spring of eager youth. But the real work for Saxon and Norman London lies before. It is to come. It is a work which is to be the making of Great Britain and of America, Australia, and the Isles. It is the work of building up, defending, and consolidating the liberties of the Anglo-Saxon race.

They were not wretched at all, these early London citizens; but, on the contrary, joyous and happy and hopeful. And not only for the reasons already stated, but for the great fact – the greatest fact of the time – of their blind and unreasoning faith. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of unreasoning faith as a factor in human happiness. The life of the meanest man was full of dignity and of splendor, because of the great inheritance assured to him by the Church. We must never leave out the Church in speaking of the past. We must never forget that all people, save here and there a doubting Rufus or a questioning Prince of Anjou, believed without the shadow of any doubt. Knowledge brought the power of questioning. As yet there was no knowledge. Therefore every man's life, however miserable, was, to his happy ignorance, the certain ante-room of heaven. We are fond of dwelling on the mediæval hell, the stupidity and the brutality of its endless torture, and the selfishness of buying salvation by masses. Hell, my friends, was always meant for the other man. He who saw the devils painted on the church-wall, rending, tearing, frying, cutting, burning the poor souls in hell, knew these souls for those of his enemies. Like Dante, he saw among them all his public and his private foes. He looked upward for his hope. There he beheld loving angels bearing aloft in their soft arms the soul redeemed to the abode of perfect bliss. In that soul he recognized himself; he saw the portraiture, exact and lifelike, of his own features.

When the ambassadors of the Caliph Haroun al Raschid brought gifts to the great King Karl, the finest thing he had to show them was the splendid service of the Church.

This story is told literally. It might be told as an allegory. In London Saxon and Norman, as also for many centuries to follow, the finest thing they had to show was the Church, with its music that moved the heart to tears; its promises, which steeled the soul to endurance; its glories, which carried the beholder far away from the wattle and clay of his hut and his grimy leathern doublet; its frown, which stood between him and the tyrannous Over Lord, and saved his home from starvation and his womankind from dishonor. Fortunate was it for the people that they had the Church to show to those ambassadors of the Moslem.

III
PLANTAGENET

I. ECCLESIASTICAL

Prince Pantagruel and his companions, pursuing their incomparable voyage, sailed three days and three nights without discovering anything, and on the fourth day made land. The Pilot told them that it was the Ringing Island; and, indeed, they heard afar off a kind of a confused and oft-repeated noise, that seemed at a distance not unlike the sound of great, middle-sized, and little bells rung all at once.

Commentators have been much exercised as to the city which the great Master of Allegory had in view when he described l'Ile Sonnante. Foolish commentators! As if even a small master of allegory, much less the great and illustrious Alcofribas Nasier, could, or would, mean any one town in particular! One might as well search for the man whose portrait he painted and called Panurge. He described all towns. For, in truth, every mediæval city was an Ile Sonnante, and the greater, the richer, the more populous, the more powerful was the city, the louder and the more frequent were the jinglings and the janglings, the sonorous clang and the melodious peal, the chimings and the strikings, the music and the jarring of the thousand Bells. They rang all day long; they rang from the great Cathedral and from the little Parish Church; from the stately monastery, the nunnery, the College of Priests, the Spital, the Chantry, the Chapel, and the Hermitage. They rang for Festivals, for Fasts, for Pageants, for Processions, for Births, Marriages, and Funerals; for the election of city officers, for Coronations, for Victories, and for daily service; they rang to mark the day and the hour; they rang in the baby; they rang out the passing soul; they rang for the bride; they rang in memory of the dead; they rang for work to begin and for work to cease; they rang to exhort, to admonish, to console.

With their ringing the City was never quiet. Four miles out of London, the sound of the Bells rang in the ears of the downcast 'prentice boy who sat upon the green slopes of Highgate: the chimes of Bow struck merrily upon his ear above the tinkling of the sheep bell, the carol of the lark, and the song of the thrush. To him they brought a promise and a hope. What they brought to the busy folk in the streets I know not; but since they were a folk of robust nerves, the musical, rolling, melodious, clashing, joyous ringing of bells certainly brought for the most part a sense of elation, hope, and companionship. So, in this our later day, the multitudinous tripper or the Hallelujah lad is not happy unless he can make, as he goes, music – loud music – in the train and on the sands. So, again, those who march in procession do not feel complete without a braying band with drums great and small, banging and beating and roaring an accompaniment to the mottoes on their banners, and uplifting the souls of the champions who are about to harangue the multitude.

The Ile Sonnante of Rabelais may have been Paris – of course it was Paris; it may have been Avignon – there is not the least doubt that it was Avignon; it may also have been London – there can be no manner of question on that point. Rabelais never saw London; but so loud was the jingle-jangle of the City bells that they smote upon his ear while he was beginning that unfinished book of his and inspired the first chapters. London, without a doubt, London, and no other, is the true Ile Sonnante.

Of Plantagenet London there is much to be said and written. Place à l'Église! It was a time when the Church covered all. Faith unquestioning seemed to have produced its full effect. The promised Kingdom, according to eyes ecclesiastic, was already among us. What could be better for the world than that it should be ruled absolutely by the Vicar of Christ? Yet the full effect of this rule proved in the event not quite what might have been expected.

In London, says an observant Frenchman, there is no street without a church and a tree. He speaks of modern London. Of London in the thirteenth century, there was no street without its monastery, its convent garden, its College of Priests, its Canons regular, its Friars, its Pardoners, its sextons, and its serving brothers, and this without counting its hundred and twenty parish churches, each with its priests, its chantries, its fraternities, and its church-yard. The Church was everywhere; it played not only an important part in the daily life, but the most important part. Not even the most rigid Puritan demanded of the world so much of its daily life and so great a share of its revenues as the Church of the Middle Ages. There were already whispered and murmured questions, but the day of revolt was still two hundred long years ahead. Meantime the Church reigned and ruled, and no man yet dared disobey.

Let us consider, therefore, as the most conspicuous feature of Plantagenet London, her great religious Houses. We have seen what they were in Norman London. Already there were there in existence the Cathedral of St. Paul's, with its canons and priests, its army of singing men, clerks, boys, and servants – itself a vast monastic House; the Priory of St. Bartholomew; the House of St. Mary Overies; the Hospital of St. Katherine; the Priory of the Holy Trinity. After three hundred years, when we look again upon the map of London, and mark in color the sites of Monastery, Nunnery, Church, College, and Church-yard, it seems as if a good fourth part of the City area was swallowed up in ecclesiastical Houses. Not so much was actually covered by buildings of the Church, but at least a fourth of the City, counting the gardens and the courts and chapels, belonged to the Church and the religious Houses. Without such a map it is impossible to estimate the enormous wealth of the mediæval Church, its power, and its authority. It is impossible to understand without such a map how enormous was that Revolution which could shake off and shatter into fragments a power so tremendous. Because, as was London, so was every other city. If London had a hundred and twenty churches, Norwich had sixty; York had forty-five. If the country all round London was parcelled out among the religious Houses, so all over the land, manors here, and estates there, broad acres everywhere belonged to the monks. But though their property was enormous, their power was far beyond that conferred by any amount of property, for they held the keys of heaven and kept open the gates of hell.

As for the vast numbers actually maintained by the Church, the single example of St. Paul's Cathedral – of course, the largest foundation in the City – will furnish an illustration. In the year 1450 the Society, a Cathedral body, included the following: the Bishop, the Dean, the four Archdeacons, the Treasurer, the Precentor, the Chancellor, thirty greater Canons, twelve lesser Canons, about fifty Chaplains or chantry priests, and thirty Vicars. Of inferior rank to these were the Sacrist and three Vergers, the Succentor, the Master of the Singing-school, the Master of the Grammar-school, the Almoner and his four Vergers, the Servitors, the Surveyor, the twelve Scribes, the Book Transcriber, the Book-binder, the Chamberlain, the Rent-collector, the Baker, the Brewer, the singing-men and choir-boys, of whom priests were made, the Bedesmen, and the poor folk. In addition to these must be added the servants of all these officers – the brewer, who brewed in the year 1286, 67,814 gallons, must have employed a good many; the baker, who ovened every year 40,000 loaves, or every day more than a hundred, large and small; the sextons, grave-diggers, gardeners, bell-ringers, makers and menders of the ecclesiastical robes, cleaners and sweepers, carpenters, masons, painters, carvers and gilders – one can very well understand that the Church of St. Paul's alone found a livelihood for thousands.

The same equipment was necessary in every other religious foundation. Not a monastery but had its great and lesser officers and their servants. In every one there were the bell-ringers, the singing-men and boys, the vergers, the gardeners, the brewers, bakers, cooks, messengers, scribes, rent-collectors, and all complete as was St. Paul's, though on a smaller scale. It does not seem too much to estimate the ecclesiastical establishments as including a fourth part of the whole population of the City.

The London monasteries lay for the most part either just within or just without the City Wall. The reason is obvious. They were founded when the City was already populous, and were therefore built upon the places where houses were less numerous and ground was of less value.

Let us, in order to visit them all, make a circuit within the City Wall, beginning from the Tower on the East.

The first House at which we stop is the Priory of Crutched Friars, that is, Crossed Friars. They wore a cross of red cloth upon their backs, and carried an iron cross in their hands. The order of the Red Cross was founded by one Conrad, of Bologna, in the year 1169. Some of the Friars found their way to London in the middle of the next century, and humbly begged of the pious folk a house to live in. Of course they got it, and many houses afterwards, with a good following of the citizens. This monastery stood behind Seething Lane, opposite St. Olave's Church. The site afterwards became that of the Navy House, and is still marked by the old stone pillars of the entrance and the open court within. This court is now a receiving house for some railway. Beyond this, on the other side of Aldgate, stood a far more important monastery, that of the Holy Trinity. The site of the place is marked – for there is not a vestige left of the ancient buildings – by a mean little square now called St. James's Square; a place of resort for the poorer Jews. This noble House was founded by Matilda, wife of Henry I., in 1109, for regular Canons of the Order of St. Augustine. The Priory, enriched by many later benefactors, became the wealthiest and most splendid in the City. Its Prior, by virtue of his office, and because the old Knighten Guild had given their property to the Priory, was Alderman of Portsoken ward; the monastery was exempted from ecclesiastical jurisdiction other than the Pope's; its church was great and magnificent, full of stately monuments, carved marbles, and rich shrines; the House was hospitable and nobly charitable to the poor.

The beautiful old church of St. Helen, filled with monuments curious and quaint, was formerly the Church of the Priory of St. Helen. This nunnery was founded by William Basing, dean of St. Paul's, in the reign of Richard I. The church, as it now stands, consists of the old Parish Church and the Nun's Chapel, formerly separated by a partition wall. The Leathersellers' Company acquired some of their ground after the Dissolution, and the old Hall of the Nunnery, afterwards the Leathersellers' Hall, was standing until the year 1799.

On the north of Broad Street stood the splendid House of Austin Friars; that is, the Friars Eremites of the Order of St. Augustine. The House was founded by Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, in the year 1253. It rapidly became one of the wealthiest Houses in the City; its church, very splendid, was filled with monuments. Part of it stands to this day. It is now used by the Dutch residents in London. The quiet courts and the square at the back of the church retain something of the former monastic arrangement and of the old tranquillity. The square is certainly one of the courts of the monastery, but I know not whether the Refectory or the Library or the Abbot's House stood here.

The next great House following the wall westward was that of St. Martin's le Grand, of which I have already spoken. It was a House of Augustine Canons. It formed a Precinct with its own Liberty. William of Wykeham was its most famous Dean. In the sanctuary Miles Forrest, one of the murderers of the two Princes in the Tower, died – "rotted away piecemeal." The Liberty survived long after the Dissolution.

Adjoining St. Martin's was the great Foundation of the Grey Friars.

They were Franciscans. Who does not know the story of St. Francis and the foundation of his great order? They were the Preachers of the poor. The first Franciscans, like the Buddhist priests, lived upon alms; they had no money, no endowments, no books, no learning, no great houses. Those who came to England – it was in the year 1224 – nine in number, of whom only one was a priest, were penniless. They first halted in Canterbury, where they were permitted to sleep at night in a room used by day as a school. Four of them presently moved on to London, where they hired a piece of ground on Cornhill, and built upon it rude cells of wattle and clay with their own hands. Already the Dominicans, their rivals – Preachers of the learned and the rich – had obtained a settlement in Oxford. The Franciscans stayed a very short time on Cornhill. In the year 1225 one John Ewin bought and presented to them a piece of ground north of Newgate Street, whither they removed. Their austerity, their poverty, their earnestness, their eloquence drew all hearts towards them. And, as always happens, their very popularity proved their ruin. Kings and queens, great lords and ladies, strove and vied with each other to show their love and admiration for the men who had given up all that the world can offer for the sake of Christ and for pity of their brothers and sisters. They showed this love in the manner common with the world. They forced upon the friars a portion of their wealth; they made them receive and enjoy the very things they had renounced. It is a wonderful record. First, the citizens began. One Lord Mayor built a new choir for their church, with a splendor worthy of the order and of the City; another built the nave to equal the choir; a third built the dormitories – no more wattle and daub for the dear friars; other citizens built Chapter House, Vestry House, Infirmary, and Refectory. Their Library was given by Dick Whittington, thrice Mayor of London. Then came the turn of the great people. Queen Margaret thought the choir of the church should be still more splendid, and added to it or rebuilt it. Queen Isabel and Queen Philippa thought that the nave should be more splendid, and with the help of the Earl and Countess of Richmond, the Earl of Gloucester and his sisters, Lord Lisle and others, built a new nave, 300 feet long, 89 feet broad, and 64 feet high. Here were buried, as in ground far more sacred than that of St. Paul's or any acre of ordinary consecration, Margaret, wife of Edward I.; Isabel, wife of Edward II.; Joan of the Tower, Queen of Scots, daughter of Edward II.; Isabel, daughter of Edward III.; Beatrice, daughter of Henry III.; and an extraordinary number of persons great and honorable in their day. What became of their monuments and of the church itself belongs to Tudor London.

All those who visit London are recommended by the guide-books to see the famous Blue-coat School. The main entrance is at the end of a narrow lane leading north from Newgate Street. On the right hand of the lane stands a great ugly pile built by Wren twenty years after the Great Fire. This is Christ Church, and it stands on part of the site of the old church of the Grey Friars. At the Dissolution, Henry VIII. made their church into a parish church, assigning to it the two parishes of St. Nicolas Shambles and St. Ewin, together with the ground occupied by the Monastery. The church within is as ugly as it is without. One shudders to think of the change from the great and splendid monastic church. On the other side of the lane is an open space, a church-yard now disused. The old church covered both this open space and the area of the modern church. Behind it stood the cloisters, the burial-ground, and the monastic buildings of the House, covering a great extent of ground. Those who go through the gate find themselves in a large quadrangle asphalted. This is now part of the boys' play-ground; their feet run every day over the old tombs and graves of the Grey Friars' burial-ground; the soil, though not accounted so sacred as that within the church itself, was considered greatly superior to that of any common church-yard. Most of the dead were buried in the habit of the Grey Friars, as if to cheat Peter into a belief of their sanctity. On the south of the quadrangle two or three arches may be observed. These are the only fragments remaining of the cloisters. The view of Christ's Hospital after the Great Fire of 1666 shows the old courts of the Abbey. The church formerly extended over the whole front of the picture; the buildings now seen are wholly modern; the cloistered square was the church-yard; the Hall stood across the north side of the first court; beyond were the courts appropriated to the service of the monks; the cells, libraries, etc., were round the great court and the small courts on the right. The Franciscan House is gone; the Friars are gone. Let us not think, however, that their work is gone. On the contrary, all that was good in it remains. That is the quality and the test of good work. It is imperishable. If you ask what is this work and where it may be found, look about you. In the prosperity of the City; in the energy, the industry, the courage, the soberness of its people; in whatever virtues they possess, the Franciscans have their share; the Grey Friars, who went straight at the people – the rough, common, ignorant people – and saved them from the destruction of those virtues which built up this realm of Britain. The old ideas change; what is to-day faith becomes to-morrow superstition; but the new order is built upon the old. It was a part of the training necessary for the English people that they should pass under the teaching of the Friars.

In the south-western corner of the City Wall were lodged the Dominicans or Black Friars.

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1

See The Two Lost Centuries of Britain, by W. H. Babcock. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1890; an excellent little work on this subject.

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2

See Loftie's History of London, Appendix N, "List of Buildings which existed before the Great Fire."

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3

A hat or bonnet. Du Cange.

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4

Fosbrooke's Monachism.

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5

Fosbrooke.

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6

Loftie calls attention to the name of our Church St. Mary Staining, i. e., built of stone, as if that was an exceptional thing.

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7

Morley's English Writers, vol. i., p. 760.

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