ancient city Troy's liberties, rights, and customs."* This is dealing with a legend in a business-like manner, worthy of grave aldermen and sheriffs. Between Brute and Richard II. there is a long interval; and the chroniclers have filled it up with many pleasant stories, and the antiquarians have embellished it with many ingenious theories. We must leap over all these. One ancient writer, however, who speaks from his own knowledge,-William FitzStephen, who died in 1191,-has left us a record in his Description of London,' which will take us back a few hundred years further. The original is in Latin. The wall of the city is high and great, continued with seven gates, which are made double, and on the north distinguished with turrets by spaces: likewise on the south, London hath been enclosed with walls and towers, but the large river of Thames, well stored with fish, and in which the tide ebbs and flows, by continuance of time hath washed, worn away, and cast down those walls.' Here, then, six hundred and fifty years ago, we find the river-bank of London in the same state as described by Sir Thomas More in his imaginary capital of Amaurote:-The city is compassed about with a high and thick stone wall, full of turrets and bulwarks. A dry ditch, but deep and broad, and overgrown with bushes, briers, and thorns, goeth about three sides or quarters of the city. To the fourth side, the river itself serveth as a ditch.'t The Saxon Chronicle tells us that in the year 1052, Earl Godwin, with his navy, passed along the southern side of the river, and so assailed the walls. A hundred and fifty years after, in the time of Fitz-Stephen, the walls were gone. About the same period arose the stone bridge of London; but that has perished before the eyes of our own generation.

There is another passage in Fitz-Stephen which takes us, as do most of his descriptions, into the every-day life of the ancient Londoners-their schools, their feasting, and their sports:

In Easter holydays they fight battles on the water.
Utopia, b. ii. c. ii.

*Stow, book i.

A shield is hanged on a pole, fixed in the midst of the stream; a boat is prepared without oars, to be carried by violence of the water, and in the fore-part thereof standeth a young man, ready to give charge upon the shield with his lance. If so be he break his lance against the shield and doth not fall, he is thought to have performed a worthy deed. If so be, without breaking his lance, he runneth

strongly against the shield, down he falleth into the water, for the boat is violently forced with the tide; but on each side of the shield ride two boats, furnished with two young men, which recover him that falleth as soon as they may. Upon the bridge, wharfs, and houses by the riverside, stand great numbers to see and laugh thereat.' Four centuries afterwards, Stow saw a somewhat similar game:

I have

seen also in the summer season, upon the river of Thames,

some rowed in wherries, with staves in their hands, flat at the fore-end, running one against another, and, for the most part, one or both of them were overthrown and well ducked.' Howell says, There was in former times a sport used upon the Thames, which is now discontinued: it was for two wherries to row, and run one against the other, with staves in their hands, flat at the fore-end; which kind of recreation is much practised among the gondolas of Venice.**

From the time of Fitz-Stephen to that of Gower, we may readily conceive that the water-communication between one part of London and another, and between London and Westminster, was constantly increasing. A portion of London Bridge was moveable, which enabled vessels of burden to pass up the river to unload at Queenhithe and other wharfs. Stairs (called bridges) and Water-gates studded the shores of both cities. Palaces arose, such as the Savoy, where the powerful nobles kept almost regal state. The Courts of Law were fixed at Westminster; and thither the citizens and strangers from the country daily resorted, preferring the easy highway of the Thames to the almost impassable road that led from Westminster to the village of Charing, and onward to London. John Lydgate, who wrote in the time of Henry V., has left us a very curious poem, entitled 'London Lyckpeny.' He gives us a picture of his coming to London to obtain legal redress of some grievance, but without money to pursue his suit. Upon quitting Westminster Hall, he says,

Then to Westminster Gate I presently went.'

This is undoubtedly the Water-gate; and, without describing anything beyond the cooks, whom he found busy with their bread and beef at the gate, when the sun was at high prime,' he adds,

Then unto London I did me hie.'

By water he no doubt went, for through Charing he would have made a day's journey. Wanting money, he has no *Londinopolis: 1657.

choice but to return to the country; and having to go 'into Kent,' he applies to the watermen at Billingsgate:-

Then hied I me to Billingsgate,

And one cried hoo-go we hence:
I pray'd a bargeman, for God's sake,
That he would spare me my expense.

Thou scap'st not here, quoth he, under two pence.'

We have a corroboration of the accuracy of this picture in
Lambarde's Perambulation of Kent.'
6
The old topogra-

pher informs us that in the time of Richard II. the inhabitants of Milton and Gravesend agreed to carry in their boats, from London to Gravesend, a passenger, with his truss or farthell, for twopence.

The poor Kentish suitor, without twopence in his pocket to pay the Gravesend bargeman, takes his solitary way on foot homeward. The gate where he was welcomed with the cry of hoo-ho, ahoy--was the great landing-place of the coasting-vessels; and the king here anciently took his toll upon imports and exports. The Kentishman comes to Billingsgate from Cornhill; but it was not an uncommon thing for boats, even in those times, to accomplish the feat of passing through the fall occasioned by the narrowness of the arches of London Bridge; and the loss of life in these adventures was not an unfrequent occurrence. Gifford, in a note upon a passage in Ben Jonson's 'Staple of News,' says somewhat pettishly of the old bridge, ‘Had an alderman ør a turtle been lost there, the nuisance would have been long since removed.' A greater man than an alderman-John Mowbray, the second Duke of Norfolk-nearly perished there in 1428. But there were landing-places in abundance between Westminster and London Bridge, so that a danger such as this was not necessary to be incurred. When the unfortunate Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was condemned to do penance in London in three open places, on three several days, she was brought by water from Westminster; and on the 13th November, 1440, was put on shore at the Temple bridge; on the 15th, at the Old Swan; and, on the 17th, at Queenhithe. Here,

F

exactly four centuries ago, we have the same stairs decribed by the same names as we find at the present day. The Old Swan (close to London Bridge) was the Old Swan in the time of Henry VI., as it continued to be in the time of Elizabeth. If we turn to the earliest maps of London we find, in the same way, Broken Wharf, and Paul's Wharf, and Essex Stairs, the Whitehall Stairs. The abiding-places of the watermen appear to have been as unchanging as their thoroughfare-the same river ever gliding, and the same inlets from that broad and cheerful highway to the narrow and gloomy streets.

6

The watermen of London, like every other class of the people, were once musical; and their oars kept time' to many a harmony, which, if not so poetical as the song of the gondoliers, was full of the heart of merry England. The old city chronicler, Fabyan, tells us that John Norman, Mayor of London (he held this dignity in 1454), was the first of all mayors who brake that ancient and old-continued custom of riding to Westminster upon the morrow of Simon and Jude's day. John Norman was rowed thither by water, for the which the waterman made of him a roundel, or song, to his great praise, the which began

"Row the boat, Norman, row to thy leman."

The watermen's ancient chorus, as we collect from old ballads, was

Heave and how, rumbelow;'

and their burden was still the same in the time of Henry VIII., not forgetting, Row the boat, Norman.'* Well might the first mayor who carried the pomp of the city to the great Thames, and made

The barge he sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn on the water,'

deserve the praises of watermen in all time! We could willingly spare many more intrinsically valuable things than the city water-pageant; for it takes us even now into

* Skelton.