The English invaders came up the Watling Street and were unsuccessfully met at Crayford. At Ockley on the Stone Street there was a great battle with the Danes. William the Conqueror, after the battle of Hastings, took Dover and Canterbury and came to London by the Watling Street; then burning Southwark, but not venturing to assault the walled city, he moved down the Stone Street and across to Farnham and Wallingford, and then north-east, by the Icknield Way, and so commanded the northern Watling Street and Erming Street and cut off retreat. A recent study of his route made from Domesday Book makes him pass through Camberwell, Merton, Guildford, and Farnham. Then crossing the river by both Wallingford and Streatley, he approached London by Little Berkhamstead, Enfield, and Tottenham.[66]
A final consideration of the roads in relation to the city shows two great routes: (1) from west to east, through Staines to Colchester; and (2) from south to north, from Chichester to Lincoln. These roads, entering the city by Holborn and the bridge, and issuing by Aldgate and Bishopsgate, were throughout the Middle Ages the great market streets, and their intersection at Leadenhall formed the “Carfax” of London.
The best elucidation of the names of the roads we have been concerned with is given by Dr. Guest. One is the street of the Ermings or Fenmen, who gave their name to places on its course. The Icknield Way, which he gives good reasons for thinking was a British road, led to the district of the Iceni (compare Dr. Rhys, Celtic Folklore, p. 676). The Watling Street he supposes to be the Irishmen’s road, from Welsh Gwythel—Goidel—Irishman. These derivations seem to be a little over symmetrical. Other roads than that through St. Albans were called Watling Street, which almost seems to be a generic term, just as in Wales the Roman ways are called Sarn Helen. In the story of Maxen Wledig (Maximus Emperor) we are told that the Empress Helen made the roads. It is probably a similar legend where Florence says that old tradition had it that London was walled by Helen. Florence says that the Watling Street was called so from the sons of King Weatla: Can this be a corruption of Wledig, or can the reference be to the British prince Guithlin, who seems to have been in power about the time of the coming of the Saxons?[67]
Horsley and others have thought that these roads were laid down for the most part immediately after the Roman conquest by Claudius, and there can hardly be a doubt of their early existence when we consider the great works of Agricola as far off as the Roman Wall.[68] Moreover, one or two milestones which have been found bear the name of Hadrian. The antiquity of our place-names, roads, and bridges is well brought out in a seventh-century charter to Chertsey Abbey. The land boundary, beginning at the mouth of the Wey, passed by Weybridge, then by the mill-stream to the old Here Street and along it to Woburn Bridge, etc. This Here Street is doubtless the present road on the south bank of the Thames; it probably led from Southwark, through Clapham—called Cloppaham in the ninth century—by Wandsworth, where was a church in the tenth century, and by Kingston, the royal town and crowning place of the later Saxon kings.[69]
The Bridge.—We hear of the existence of the bridge about seventy years after Alfred’s time in connection with the punishment of a woman who was to be taken and “a-drownded at Lundene-brigce.”[70] In a poem on Holy Olaf the King of Norway, by a contemporary, he is said to have broken down London Bridge in an attack on the Danes in the interest of Ethelred about 1014.[71] It is curious that the English Chronicles do not speak of this, and it is difficult to fit in, but in any case the story is almost contemporary.
An extended but later account of the incident is given in the Heimskringla: “Now first they made for London and went up the Thames with the host of the ships, but the Danes held the city. On the other side of the river there is a great Cheaping-town called Southwark (Sudurvirke); there the Danes had great arrayal; they had dug great dykes, on the inner side whereof they had built a wall of turf and stone.... A bridge was there across the river betwixt the city and Southwark, so broad that waggons might be driven past each other thereover. On the bridge were made strongholds, both castles and bulwarks, looking down stream, so high that they reached a man above his waist; but under the bridge were pales stuck into the bottom of the river. And when an onset was made the host stood on the bridge all along it and warded it. King Ethelred was mickle mind-sick how he was to win the bridge.” King Olaf made wooden shelters over his boats, “and the host of the Northmen rowed right up under the bridge and lashed cables round the pales which upheld the bridge, and they fell to their oars and rowed down stream as hard as they might, ... and the pales having broken from under it, the bridge broke down by reason thereof; ... and after this they made an onset on Southwark and won it. And when the townsfolk [of London] saw that the river Thames was won, so that they might not hinder ships from faring up into the land, they were afeared, and gave up the town and took King Ethelred in. So says Ottar the Swart:—
O battle-bold, the cunning
Of Yggs storm! Yet thou brakest
Down London Bridge: it happed thee
To win the land of snakes there.”
This verse is sometimes translated so as to read “London Bridge is broken down” in the first line, like the well-known children’s song; but there have been many breakings down since the time of Olaf, and it is unnecessary to force such a remote origin for the ditty. As to the bridge itself, the account just given as to its being of wood agrees with the fact that no piers seem to have been preserved when it was rebuilt in the twelfth century. That it should have been fortified agrees with contemporary events, for Charles the Bald had built a fortified bridge at Paris to stop the pirates going up the river.
The bridge, as we have seen, was required by the Roman roads, and must have been of Roman origin. Roach Smith, indeed, even considered that it might have been the bridge by which Claudius is said to have crossed the river, and points out that the Itinerary shows that bridges were not uncommon in Britain.[72] “This presumptive evidence” [as to London Bridge being of early Roman origin] “is supported by recent discoveries. Throughout the entire line of the old bridge, the bed of the river was found to contain ancient wooden piles; and when these piles, subsequently to the erection of the new bridge (about 1835), were pulled up to deepen the channel of the river, many thousands of Roman coins, with abundance of Roman tiles and pottery, were discovered; and immediately beneath some of the central piles, brass medallions of Aurelius, Faustina, and Commodus. All these remains are indicative of a bridge. The enormous quantity of Roman coins may be accounted for by the well-known practice of the Romans to use them to perpetuate the memory of their conquests and public works. They may have been deposited either upon the building or repair of the bridge. The great rarity of the medallions is corroborative of this opinion.” Many bronzes and other works of art were also found.[73]