To Canterbury ward, I mean it so, Shall have a supper at your aller cost Here in this place, sitting by this post. When that ye comen again from Canterbury." The proposition is accepted in the genial spirit in which it is offered, and by one assent." Fresh wine is brought, the pilgrims drink, and then retire to 66 rest "Withouten any longer tarrying." The hall is therefore soon deserted of all but the attendants, who rake the fire abroad upon the immense hearth: for a few moments the reflection from the ruddy embers illumines here and there a projecting corner of the oak carvings of the ceiling, but it soon fades into a few bright sparkles, running to and fro as if to escape their doom, and dying in the attempt; till these too at last utterly disappear from our gaze. And now silence and darkness reign in the pilgrims' hall. Silence and darkness!-types of the future desolation which await the now flourishing hostelry,-of a time when the only pilgrims who shall visit its chambers will be the grateful lovers of the genius of the brilliant "Morning Star" of our poetry, coming to worship the Poet at his own proper shrine. THERE is as much, perhaps, in a bridge to take hold both of the affections and the imagination as in any other work whatever-dome, column, spire, or "starypointing pyramid"-by which human hands have given durable expression to the ideal in that peculiar form of art which we distinguish as the architectural. Deeper thoughts of a certain class thoughts that carry us out of this world— may be awakened by the view of a church; but, as an object for our every-day feelings of regard and attachment, a bridge stands among buildings next after a man's own home. Whether it be but a simple arch crossing the humblest village brook, or the mighty structure whose far-extending line of piers breasts the flood of some broad river rolling through a populous capital, what other public accommodation is at once so universally and so palpably serviceable? Then, its essential beauty and elegance are equal to its utility. Spanning the otherwise impassable chasm with its firm roadway, it carries us over the flowing water, and through the air, as if it were a winged thing. It is the rainbow brought down from heaven to earth, and made substantial and permanent. And divers are the eternal bridges that poetry has built for itself, out of those sunbeams of its own that are far stronger and more lasting than any beams that were ever hewn in forest, from "Al-sirat's arch" and that asphaltic pavement erst thrown over the foaming deep between earth and hell by Death and his G mother Sin, to that broken one which Mirza, in his vision, beheld standing in the midst of the tide of eternity, with the multitudes of people passing over it, and continually dropping through its trap-doors and pitfalls, and that other, gleaming with prismatic light, and showing like "one entire and perfect chrysolite," into which the serpent, the emblem of Intellectual Strength, is finally transformed in Goethe's wondrous tale. A bridge, too, figures conspicuously in some of the most poetic passages of history-from the expedition of Xerxes"Over Hellespont Bridging his way" and the contemporary defence of the Pons Sublicius at Rome by the gallant Horatius Cocles, down to Napoleon's brilliant carnage and victory at Lodi, and the still bloodier three days of his baffled charges at Arcole. And in that poetry which is mixed of the imaginative and the real, shedding its supernatural light on earthly scenes, what has not Shakspere made the Rialto to all of us? In the annals of the metropolis, at least, if not of the kingdom, London Bridge has been one of the most famous of our public monuments for not much short of a thousand years. The Thames at London is now crossed by no fewer than six magnificent bridges; but it is not yet quite a century ago since London Bridge afforded the only passage from the one bank of the river to the other, and the only entrance into the town from the south, as it had done for eight centuries previous. Whoever, therefore, went out or came in, to or from the wealthiest, the most populous, and in every sense the most important parts of the country, or to or from almost any one of the ports of communication with other countries, passed, from the days of the Saxons to near the end of the reign of George II., either over this great thoroughfare or under it. There it stood, looking down upon the ever-flowing river, and coursed itself by almost as unresting a living tide, of the multitudes of one generation pursuing those of another, amid “the masques and mummeries and triumphs" wherewith each successively sought to gild its mortality. But the bridge itself also underwent various transformations in this long course of ages. Dion Cassius makes mention of a bridge over the Thames at the time of the expedition of the Emperor Claudius, in the year 44; but it is much more probable that that historian, writing after the lapse of a century and a half, should have fallen into a mistake as to such a matter, than that any such work should have existed in the then state both of the Thames and of British civilization. Where the bridge stood he does not say; but his language would seem to imply that it was not very far from the mouth of the river—a notion which never could have entered into the head of a person knowing anything about the Thames, and which may almost be taken as a convincing proof that the story he tells should be referred altogether-in so far, at least, as the bridge is concerned-to another river, -perhaps, as has been suggested, to some mere tributary of the Thames, over which some rude description of bridge may even thus early have been thrown. There is every reason to believe that at this time, and down to a much later date, the Thames, even at the point where London now stands, and much higher up, flowed for the greater part through broad marshes; and nothing that we know of * Entitled Das Märchen, that is, The Tale-regarded by the Germans as the tale of tales, and nobly trans. lated into English by Mr. Carlyle, in his Miscellanies; London, 1839. the Britons before the Roman conquest of the country warrants us in supposing that they possessed anything like the mechanical skill that would have been required to construct a bridge for so wide a water-course, even if the banks had been ever so suitable for the purpose. No other ancient writer has any notice of a bridge over the Thames at London or elsewhere, either at this date or at any time during the connexion of the Romans with our island. It is not improbable, nevertheless, that in the course of the period of between three and four centuries, during which Britain was a Roman province, and London continued to grow in extent and opulence, spreading itself, as it appears to have done, over the southern as well as the northern bank of the river, the inhabitants, or their governors, may have united the two by one of those structures which we know were erected in all other parts of the empire, and some of the examples of which left by the Romans are perhaps still unexcelled by the best efforts of modern science and skill. But if London had her bridge in the Roman times, both the structure itself, and the very memory and tradition of it, have wholly perished. There appears to have been no bridge of any kind over the Thames in the year 993, when, as the Saxon Chronicle tells us, King Anlaf, or Olave, of Norway, sailed up the river with a numerous fleet as far as Staines, which he plundered, without having encountered any impediment, as far as is mentioned, or any attempt having been made to bar his passage. But this very expedition of Olave's, perhaps, was the occasion of the erection of the first Saxon bridge at London. It is at any rate certain that there was a bridge here within a few years from this time: the old Icelandic historian, Snorro Sturleson, who wrote in the thirteenth century, has preserved a most curious relation of the Battle of London Bridge, fought in the year 1008. Under the disastrous rule of our Ethelred the Unready (Adalradr, the Norse writer calls him), the Danish pirates had overrun and, conquered the greater part of England; and, in particular, they held possession both of the town of London, and also of the great emporium, or market, called Sudrvirki (Southwark), on the opposite bank of the river, which they had fortified with a deep ditch and a strong rampart. But in this year, 1008, Ethelred, who had been obliged to take refuge in France, returned home, collected an army, and prepared to make a great effort for the expulsion of the invaders. In this enterprise he was assisted by his old enemy, the Norwegian King Olave, who had now been baptised, and who, indeed, was afterwards canonised, and is the Saint Olave of the Calendar. At the part of the river where London and Southwark stood, there was, Snorro goes on to inform us, a bridge wide enough to allow two carriages, if they met upon it, to pass each other; and upon it were erected defences of various kinds, both turrets, and also roofed bulwarks, raised breast-high: the bridge itself was sustained by posts fixed in the bed of the river. These defences were, we should suppose, a portion of the original and proper structure of the bridge, which had probably been erected as much for warlike purposes, and for barring the passage of the river, as for affording a means of transit between the one bank and the other. For the present they were, like the two towns, occupied and manned by the Danes; while below bridge lay King Olave with his fleet. An attempt was made in the first instance by Ethelred to carry the bridge by an attack from the land; but this failed; and then at a council of the chiefs, which was called by the almost despairing Saxon King to consider what should be or could be done, Olave offered that, if the rest would support him with their land forces, he would try if he could not manage the matter with his ships. The proposition having been adopted, the necessary preparations were set about on all hands; and the first thing King Olave did was to direct some old houses to be pulled down, and with the wooden poles and twigs of osier thence obtained, to raise upon each of his ships a huge scaffolding, extending over the sides of the vessel, so as to enable the men to reach the enemy with their swords without coming from under cover; and at the same time, as he imagined, of such strength as to resist any stones that might be thrown down upon them from the upper works of the bridge. When everything was in readiness, both on the river and on shore, the ships rowed towards the bridge against the tide; but, as soon as they got near to it, they were assailed with so furious a shower of missiles and great stones, that, notwithstanding Olave's ingenious basket-work, not only helmets and shields gave way, but even some of the ships were sorely shattered, so that a considerable number of the men made off with themselves altogether. On this, driven to their last shifts, Olave and his brave Norsemen, rowing close up to the bridge, bound their barks with ropes and cables to the piles on which it was supported, and then, tugging their oars with all their might, and being assisted by the tide (we now see why they chose to make their attack while it was ebbing), they soon felt the fabric yielding to their efforts, and in no long time had the satisfaction of bringing down piers and bridge with one great crash into the water-the loads of stones that had been collected upon it, with the crowd of its armed defenders, only helping to make the ruin more complete. Great numbers of the Danes were drowned; those who could, fled, some to London, some to Southwark. But both towns, blockaded as they were from the river, which then was almost their only highway of communication with the rest of the country, soon found it expedient to surrender to Ethelred. Snorro goes on to tell us that Olave's exploit was celebrated in song by more than one Norwegian bard; and he even records some of their verses; but these do not enable us to add any material fact to the excellent old chronicler's own very lucid prose narrative.* The bridge which King Olave thus pulled down with his ships and their strong cables was no doubt constructed only of wood; and it appears to have been soon rebuilt of the same material; for there certainly was once more a bridge over the Thames at London, when the Danish king, Canute, invaded the country in 1016. His fleet, the Saxon chronicler informs us, after stopping for a short time at Greenwich, proceeded up the river to London; "where," it is added, “they sank a deep ditch on the south side, and dragged their ships to the west side of the bridge." The meaning seems to be, that they towed their ships past the bridge through a canal which they dug on the Surrey side of the river for that purpose. At any rate, the mention of the bridge is express. Maitland, the modern historian of London, even conceived that he had traced the course of Canute's canal: "By a diligent search of several days," he says, "I discovered the vestigia and length of this artificial water-course: its outflux from the river Thames was where the Great Wet Dock below Rotherhithe is situate; whence, *See this passage of Snorro's History extracted, with a Latin translation, in Johnson's Antiquitates CeltoScandicæ, 4to., Hauniæ (Copenhagen), 1786; pp. 89-93. |