(As it stood about A.D. 1600.)
The bridge was finished in 1209, when four “worthy marchants of London” had become “principall maisters of that work.”[26] It was furnished with houses, a chapel, and defensive towers. It immediately became celebrated, and was the admiration of all England. The Scot, Sir David Lindesay, Earl of Crawford, having fallen out with Lord Welles, ambassador at the Scottish Court, a duel was decided on, and Lindesay chose London Bridge as the place of combat (1390). He crossed the length of the kingdom, supplied with a safe-conduct from King Richard II, and the duel solemnly came off at the place fixed in the presence of an immense concourse. The first shock was so violent that the lances were shivered, but the Scotchman remained immovable in his saddle. The people, fearing for the success of the English diplomat, shouted that his adversary was tied to his horse against all rules. Hearing this Lindesay, by way of reply, leapt lightly to the ground, with one bound returned to the saddle and, charging his adversary anew, overthrew and grievously wounded him.[27]
The houses built on the bridge were several storeys high; they had cellars in the thickness of the piers. When the inhabitants needed water they lowered their buckets by ropes out of the windows and filled them in the Thames. Sometimes they helped with their ropes poor fellows whose boat had capsized: the arches were narrow, and it was not uncommon in the dark for a boat to strike against the piers and be dashed to pieces. The Duke of Norfolk and several others were saved in this manner in 1428, but some of their companions were drowned. At other times the inhabitants themselves had need of help, for it happened occasionally that the houses, badly repaired, leaned forward and fell in one {48} block into the river. A catastrophe of this kind took place in 1481.
One of the twenty arches of the bridge, the thirteenth from the City side, formed a drawbridge to allow boats to pass,[28] and also to close the approach to the town; this was the obstacle which in 1553 hindered the insurgents led by Sir Thomas Wyatt from entering London. Beside the movable arch rose a tower on the summit of which the executioner long placed the heads of decapitated criminals. That of the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, bled for a time on the end of a pike on this tower before it was redeemed by Margaret Roper, the daughter of the thinker who had written—“Utopia.”
Travellers wondered at the gruesome sight. “In London,” wrote Joseph Justus Scaliger, who visited the city in 1566, “there ever were many heads on the bridge. . . . I have seen there, as it were [masts] of ships and at the top of them quarters of men’s corpses.”[29]
In 1576, this tower of sombre memories was splendidly reconstructed; the new one, containing fine rooms, flooded with light by innumerable windows, was entirely of wood, carved and gilt, in the “paper worke” style popular in Elizabeth’s time, censured by steady Harrison. It was called “None-such House.” The heads of the “traitors,” sometimes traitors, sometimes saints, were no more to pollute a building so cheerful in aspect; they were placed on the next tower on the Southwark side. Four years after this change, fashionable Lyly the {49} Euphuist ended one of his books with a triumphal praise of England, its products, its universities, its capital, adding: “Among all the straunge and beautiful showes, mee thinketh there is none so notable as the Bridge which crosseth the Theames, which is in manner of a continuall streete, well replenyshed with large and stately houses on both sides, and situate upon twentie arches, whereof each one is made of excellent free stone squared, euerye one of them being three-score foote in height, and full twentie in distaunce one from an other.”[30]
The same arrangement prevailed in the case of important bridges in many countries. In Paris the “Notre Dame” bridge had the appearance of a street with sixty-eight houses built on it.[31] The bridge at Poissy[32] and others were of the same sort, the most famous of those which remain being the “Ponte Vecchio” in Florence.
Even at the time when Lyly praised London Bridge as deserving a place among the “straunge and beautiful {50} showes” of the city, and Stow described it as “a worke verie rare,” the structure was giving more and more frequent signs of decay. Ben Jonson describes a little later his Pennyboy senior as minding
“A curtesie no more then London-bridge
What arch was mended last.”[33]