To sum up, the date of the bridge is also the date of the first military settlement on the site of London. It is also the date of the stone fort erected beside the Walbrook. After the bridge was built the road was constructed; its modern names are Oxford Street and Holborn; it connected London by land with the great highway of the island. Both the road and the bridge were at first needed for purely military purposes. When the Port of London increased in importance, when it became easier to carry goods for export and to receive imported goods by London than to go all the way to Dover, the caravans adopted the new road and poured into London what they had previously taken to Dover. But neither the new road nor the bridge was built for anything but military purposes.
The first allusion to the bridge occurs in the Chronicle under the year A.D. 457, when the Britons, defeated at Crayford or Creganford by the Saxons, fled for life, taking refuge in London. Of course, if there had been no bridge, the defeated army could not have entered London in this wild haste; in fact they would not have attempted it.
[CHAPTER VII]
LONDON STONE
Besides the wall, there are two other monuments, still surviving, of Roman London. One is “London Stone”; the other is the Roman bath in the Strand, which I have already mentioned (p. 98).
There does not appear to be any exact account of the stone as it was before the fire which so grievously diminished it. Strype says that it was much worn away, only a stump remaining. What is left is nothing but a fragment. There was formerly, however, a large foundation. It stood on the south side of Cannon Street, from which point all the mileage of the roads was measured. In the romance of Sir Bevis of Hampton there is a great battle in the streets of London:—
“So many men were now seen dead.
For the water of the Thames for blood ran red:
From St. Mary Bow to London Stone.”
The first Mayor of London, Henry FitzAylwin, lived in a house on the north side of St. Swithin’s, and was called Henry FitzAylwin of London Stone.