Our materials for sketching Saxon London are singularly scanty; yet some faint picture of it we may perhaps hope to convey.
Our readers must, therefore, divest their minds entirely of all remembrance of that great ocean of houses that has now spread like an inundation from the banks of the winding Thames, surging over the wooded ridges that rise northward, and widening out from Whitechapel eastward to Kensington westward. They must rather recall to their minds some small German town, belted in with a sturdy wall, raised not for ornament, but defence, with corner turrets for archers, and pierced with loops whence the bowmen may drive their arrows at the straining workers of the catapult and mangonels (those Roman war-engines we used against the cruel Danes), and with stone-capped places of shelter along the watchmen's platforms, where the sentinels may shelter themselves during the cold and storm, when tired of peering over the battlements and looking for the crafty enemy Essex-wards or Surrey way. No toy battlements of modern villa or tea-garden are those over which the rough-bearded men, in hoods and leather coats, lean in the summer, watching the citizens disporting themselves in the Moorfields, or in winter sledging over the ice-pools of Finsbury. Not for mere theatrical pageant do they carry those heavy axes and tough spears. Those bossed targets are not for festival show; those buff jackets, covered with metal scales, have been tested before now by Norsemen's ponderous swords and the hatchets of the fierce Jutlanders.
In such castle rooms as antiquaries now visit, the Saxon earls and eldermen quaffed their ale, and drank "wassail" to King Egbert or Ethelwolf. In such dungeons as we now see with a shudder at the Tower, Saxon traitors and Danish prisoners once peaked and pined.
We must imagine Saxon London as having three component parts—fortresses, convents, and huts. The girdle of wall, while it restricted space, would give a feeling of safety and snugness which in our great modern city—which is really a conglomeration, a sort of pudding-stone, of many towns and villages grown together into one shapeless mass—the citizen can never again experience. The streets would in some degree resemble those of Moscow, where, behind fortress, palace, and church, you come upon rows of mere wooden sheds, scarcely better than the log huts of the peasants, or the sombre felt tents of the Turcoman. There would be large vacant spaces, as in St. Petersburg; and the suburbs would rapidly open beyond the walls into wild woodland and pasture, fen, moor, and common. A few dozen fishermen's boats from Kent and Norfolk would be moored by the Tower, if, indeed, any Saxon fort had ever replaced the somewhat hypothetical Roman fortress of tradition; and lower down some hundred or so cumbrous Dutch, French, and German vessels would represent our trade with the almost unknown continent whence we drew wine and furs and the few luxuries of those hardy and thrifty days.
In the narrow streets, the fortress, convent, and hut would be exactly represented by the chieftain and his bearded retinue of spearmen, the priest with his train of acolytes, and the herd of half-savage churls who plodded along with rough carts laden with timber from the Essex forests, or driving herds of swine from the glades of Epping. The churls we picture as grim but hearty folk, stolid, pugnacious, yet honest and promise-keeping, over-inclined to strong ale, and not disinclined for a brawl; men who had fought with Danes and wolves, and who were ready to fight them again. The shops must have been mere stalls, and much of the trade itinerant. There would be, no doubt, rudimentary market-places about Cheapside (Chepe is the Saxon word for market); and the lines of some of our chief streets, no doubt, still follow the curves of the original Saxon roads.
The date of the first Saxon bridge over the Thames is extremely uncertain, as our chapter on London Bridge will show; but it is almost as certain as history can be that, soon after the Dane Olaf's invasion of England (994) in Ethelred's reign, with 390 piratical ships, when he plundered Staines and Sandwich, a rough wooden bridge was built, which crossed the Thames from St. Botolph's wharf to the Surrey shore. We must imagine it a clumsy rickety structure, raised on piles with rough-hewn timber planks, and with drawbridges that lifted to allow Saxon vessels to pass. There was certainly a bridge as early as 1006, probably built to stop the passage of the Danish pirate boats. Indeed, Snorro Sturleson, the Icelandic historian, tells us that when the Danes invaded England in 1008, in the reign of Ethelred the Unready (ominous name!), they entrenched themselves in Southwark, and held the fortified bridge, which had pent-houses, bulwarks, and shelter-turrets. Ethelred's ally, Olaf, however, determined to drive the Danes from the bridge, adopted a daring expedient to accomplish this object, and, fastening his ships to the piles of the bridge, from which the Danes were raining down stones and beams, dragged it to pieces, upon which, on very fair provocation, Ottar, a Norse bard, broke forth into the following eulogy of King Olaf, the patron saint of Tooley Street:—
"And thou hast overthrown their bridge, O thou storm of the sons of Odin, skilful and foremost in the battle, defender of the earth, and restorer of the exiled Ethelred! It was during the fight which the mighty King fought with the men of England, when King Olaf, the son of Odin, valiantly attacked the bridge at London. Bravely did the swords of the Volsces defend it; but through the trench which the sea-kings guarded thou camest, and the plain of Southwark was crowded with thy tents."
It may seem as strange to us, at this distance of time, to find London Bridge ennobled in a Norse epic, as to find a Sir Something de Birmingham figuring among the bravest knights of Froissart's record; but there the Norse song stands on record, and therein we get a stormy picture of the Thames in the Saxon epoch.
It is supposed that the Saxon kings dwelt in a palace on the site of the Baynard's Castle of the Middle Ages, which stood at the river-side just west of St. Paul's, although there is little proof of the fact. But we get on the sure ground of truth when we find Edward the Confessor, one of the most powerful of the Saxon kings, dwelling in saintly splendour at Westminster, beside the abbey dedicated by his predecessors to St. Peter. The combination of the palace and the monastery was suitable to such a friend of the monks, and to one who saw strange visions, and claimed to be the favoured of Heaven. But beyond and on all sides of the Saxon palace everywhere would be fields—St. James's Park (fields), Hyde Park (fields), Regent's Park (fields), and long woods stretching northward from the present St. John's Wood to the uplands of Epping.
As to the City residences of the Saxon kings, we have little on record; but there is indeed a tradition that in Wood Street, Cheapside, King Athelstane once resided; and that one of the doors of his house opened into Addle Street, Aldermanbury (addle, from the German word edel, noble). But Stow does not mention the tradition, which rests, we fear, on slender evidence.