London's Pride
Old London Bridge. By Gordon Home. (Lane. 3Js.. 6d.) IN this volume, strikingly illustrated by the reproduction of contemporary prints and maps, Major Home, Who is London's latest historian and one of her best, tells the story of Old London Bridge from the cradle to the grave. And not from the cradle only ; he gives us an account• of (so to speak) the bridge's pm-natal life when it was built of wood— of elm throughout at one stage of its existence. There is strong reason for believing that London must always have possessed a bridge ever since it became an important centre of commerce, and that was before the Romans came. If the Gauls, the kinsmen of the British Celts; could bridge a large river like the Loire, as Caesar tells us they did, why not a British bridge over the shallow Thames ? Caesar himself who could throw a bridge over the Rhine in ten days (because he deemed it beneath the dignity of a Roman army to cross otherwise) surely did the same to the Thames, after he had entered Londinium. Caesar'S successors unquestionably did so, and Old London Bridge occupied approximately the site of the Roman bridge, along the line of which thousands of Roman coins have been dredged out of the river. With the usefulness of such a structure before their eyes it is more than likely that the invading Saxons continued to maintain it. True that there is no documentary mention of a bridge from the second to the tenth century, but on the other hand " coins representing all-the centuries from Wulfred, Archbishop of Canterbury (803-29) to William and Mary were dredged up on approximately the same line."
It was still a wooden bridge that tied the City to the Borough in early Norman times, but in the year 1176 Peter the Bridge Master, Chaplain of St. Mary Colechurch, started a building of stone which was standing till only a hundred years ago. In 1209 the stone bridge was finished " by (according to Stow) the worthy Merchants of London, Serle Mercer, William Almaine and Benedict Botewrite." Almost immediately the bridge became a little world in itself. It had its own estate and a store depot and office at the Bridge House in Southwark. A drawbridge and two strongly fortified gates protected the southern end ; the drawbridge was raised at the rate of sixpence a time to admit- the passage of ships, and in 1465 a foreign ship smashed the windows of one of the houses on the bridge, which cost the careless alien a shilling fine. In_ the middle of the bridge stood a chapel dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury, but -destroyed as a sacred building in 1588 by Henry VIII on the class-conscious ground that "Thomas Becket, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury," had been guilty of treason against Henry II 368 years before. As the centuries developed, a double row of houses and shops, which sold hats, spurs, gloves and haberdashery, lined the bridge from end to end, and both at Bridge Foot and Bridge Head there stood an inn—the Bear in Southwark, probably a very good inn, since it was patronised by Pepys, and Samuel was on all occasions in the habit of doing himself very well. The roadway, some twelve to twenty feet wide between the houses, was not always in good repair, for the same historian (after a call at the Bear) records that he went " through the darke and dirt over the bridge, and my leg fell in a hole broke on the bridge,
but, the Constable standing there to keep people from it, I was catched up, otherwise I had broke my leg ; for which mercy the Lord be praised ! "
Sewage-problems did not the affect the bridge-dwellers, for there was the river underneath, and owing to that and to fresh draughts of air through the houses, life on the bridge was much healthier than in the City, especially as regards plague infection. So restful, too, was the roar of the current through the arches that a Mr. Baldwin, a haberdasher who lived on the bridge in the eighteenth century, found that when ordered to Chiselhurst for a change of air, he could not sleep there owing to the absence of the familiar noise. Friday's fish was easily available at Billingsgate, and James Howell in his Londinopolis (1657) produces the picturesque statement (omitted by Major Home) that it was " usual to take up Haddocks with one's hand beneath the Bridge." One has been told that British Columbians capture salmon in umbrellas, but hand-caught haddocks under London Bridge, even in the seventeenth century, seem a little difficult.
If the swift current under the arches (besides lulling Mr. Baldwin to sleep) drove wheels so that corn could be ground at the Southwark end and water raised at the other for swilling the gutters of Bishopsgate, Aldgate and the bridge itself, this pride of London and " Wonder of the world" had its drawback. Its twenty very narrow arches, with the projecting " starlings " on either side of each, were in effect a weir across the river, against which ice readily piled itself up in winter, and through which at certain states of the tide it was very dangerous for small boats to pass. In 1428 the bridge was described as " cause of spyllyng of many a gentilman and othere," and altogether thousands of lives were lost in the shooting of it. Pepys again (invaluable source of all sorts of Londiniana) records " the passage of a Frenchman through London Bridge, where, when he saw the great fall, he begun to cross himself and say his prayers in the greatest fear in the world, and soon as he was over, he swore " Morbleu ! c'est le plus grand plaisir du monde," being the most like a French humour in the world."
Underneath the bridge there was danger ; above on one of its gates there was blood. On the gate-battlements for centuries were exposed the heads of so-called traitors—William Wallace the first of them, and in the sixteenth century the heads of Sir Thomas More, and Bishop Fisher. Once in Elizabeth's reign some Easterlings, employed in the Mint melting down base money, fell sick of the fumes of the molten metal and " were advised to find a cure by drinking from the skull of a dead man." The alderman in charge of the Mint therefore obtained leave " to take of the headds upon London Bridge and made cuppes thereof, whereof! they [the Easterlings] dranke and founde some relief althoughe the mooste of them dyed."
What has been written gives a sample merely of the quality of this excellent book. Interesting in the extreme it is, clear and methodical. Specially useful are the map-pictures at the end which display seven phases in the bridge's growth and which form for it a sort of architectural life-compendium. They are a worthy finale to a volume which is one of immense industry, accurately picturesque and as nearly exhaustive as may be till all the Bridge House records are calendared.
M. J. C. M.
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