NO. 3. IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY: THE TOMB OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR WITH ITS VELVET COVERING See pages [17] and [22]
There were also some low hills quite close to the north bank of the river. Let us fancy that we have gone back through the ages, many hundreds of years before ever the Romans came to this country, and that we are standing—you and I—facing the river on one of those hills, that on which St. Paul's now stands. What do we see? To our right, under its steep clay bank, so high it is almost a cliff, the Fleet runs on its way to the Thames; to our left is the hill; behind us, all the way up to the hills of Hampstead, are tangled forests, and in the low ground are wide marshes; and in front is the river. It is low-water; on either side of the stream are great stretches of mud and sand, wet marshy places, such as you may have seen at some place by the sea where the shore is very flat and the tide goes out very far. Beyond the marsh, on the southern shore, I think there is a wide shallow lake, for to this day some of the land there is below the level of the river at high-water. As we watch, look! a little rippling wave runs over the flats between the sand-banks; the tide has turned,—how fast it rises, how far it spreads! Before long the wide waste before us is covered with grey waters; it has become a great lake or sea. Nowadays embankments, such as you see in [picture 1], keep the river in its place; but in the long-ago times of which we are thinking every high tide must have spread far and wide over what is now dry land.
NO. 4. THE FIRST CORONATION IN THE ABBEY See page [21]
Could any people have wished to live in such a watery place? Yes, indeed they did; and under the bed of the Fleet River, near its mouth, traces have been found of their homes. That ancient people must have had many enemies,—other men who fought them, fierce wild animals, wolves and other creatures which have not lived in England for hundreds and hundreds of years; and to defend themselves that people had such poor weapons, perhaps made only of bronze; so they sought for a very safe dwelling-place. Down into the muddy bed of the river they drove great wooden posts, such posts as men drive down now into river or sea when they are building a pier. The worn tops of those old timbers have been found showing up through the soil where once the Fleet ran; and on them once rested a platform of wood on which houses were built. Is not this a piece of history written in the soil? The first men who tried to read it understood more easily the meaning of those worn old posts because to this day the brown people, who live in one of the great islands to the south-east of Asia, build their houses on just such platforms out over the water.
How long did the men of that far-off time live in these strange river-dwellings? That we do not know; it may have been for very many years. At last (so some learned men believe) they built for themselves a fort or stronghold on the high land near-by, perhaps where St. Paul's now stands, but more likely lower down the river, on the next hill; this stronghold may have been the beginning of London. If, as some people think, London means "The Fort of the Waters," or "The Lake Fort," was it not well named?