Sing cuckoo!”
“That’s the first verse of a song that is more than a hundred years old even in this year 1388 to which we’ve gone back,” said Godmother. “Yet you can understand it pretty well, can’t you? It shows how near to the language we speak to-day, the speech of the fourteenth century is growing.”
“Yes. And isn’t it lovely for those children to hear the cuckoo and pick flowers just on the other side of London Bridge? Oh, I wish the country came right up to the City now—like this,” sighed Betty, nodding towards the fields and woods that made a green belt close behind the wall.
“Godmother!” she exclaimed suddenly, pointing to a sort of castle near the river bank. “There’s something I know! Why, surely it’s the Tower of London? Only there’s not so much of it as there is now,” she added.
“Yes, it’s the Tower right enough—three hundred years old already in 1388, and eight hundred years old in our own time. But now, my dear, before you get too distracted by all you’re seeing and hearing, I’m going to take you in here to talk history for a few minutes.”
Betty followed her into the porch of the chapel on the Bridge, where they sat down on a bench out of sight of all the gay life outside.
“We left London,” Godmother began, “empty and deserted, with a group of our Saxon ancestors whom we may call English people, standing uncertainly outside the walls built round the city by the departed Romans. What happened next?”
“Those English people settled in London, and in time made it alive and busy again.”
Godmother nodded. “And what became of the British who used to live here?”
“They were driven West, into Wales, and are the Welsh people now.”