Fig. 16.—Earliest Printed View of
London from the Chronycle of
Englonde, Pynson 1510.

The embankments seem to have been called walls. The names of Bermondsey Wall and Wapping Wall still survive opposite one another; and “wall” enters into the names of several places bordering on the river, as Millwall and Blackwall, and St. Peter’s on the Wall, at Bradwell, Essex, where the north bank ends. At Lambeth Pennant noted that the name Narrow Walls occurred. The general opinion is that these banks are either Roman or pre-Roman work. Wren thought Roman.[30]Before the locks were made on the river the tide ran up past Richmond to near the inlet of the Mole.[31] London held the jurisdiction over the river from Yanlet to Staines from the twelfth century at least. The limit at either end is marked by a “London Stone.”

FitzStephen calls the river “the great fish-bearing Thames.” Howel in his Londinopolis says: “The Thames water useth to be as clear and pellucid as any such great river in the world, except after a land flood, when ’tis usual to take up haddocks with one’s hand beneath the Bridge.” Harrison (1586) writes: “What should I speak of the fat and sweet salmons daily taken in this stream, and that in such plenty after the time of smelt be past, as no river in Europe is able to exceed it.” Even in the last century stray whales and porpoises used to find their way up on the tide. The Saxon foredwellers must have had their fill of fish. Even the Thames swans can be traced back to the fourteenth century in a document relating to the Tower.[32] William Dunbar in 1501 wrote:—

Above all ryvers thy Ryver hath renowne
Whose beryall stremys, pleasant and preclare
Under thy lusty wallys runneth down
Where many a Swanne doth swymme with winges fare.

Stow’s account of the smaller streams “serving the city” is the most unfortunate in the classic survey, and entirely untrustworthy.

In the hollow some distance west of Ludgate was a tidal inlet; a part of its bed has (in 1900) just been exposed in New Bridge Street; the name Fleet, indeed, must express a tidal creek. Early in the twelfth century the district beyond it is called ultra Fletam.[33] The inlet gave its name to the bridge and street passing over it from Ludgate. Rishanger calls the latter Fleet-Bridge Street. Henry II. gave to the Templars a site for a mill super Fletam Juxta Castelum Bainard, and all the course of the water of Fleet and a messuage juxta pontem de Flete. A messuage on the Fleet was also given to them by Gervase of Cornhill, Teintarius, and this record is interesting as giving us the calling of the great Londoner treated of so fully by Mr. Round.[34] Gervase was one of the most important personalities in twelfth-century London, and it is not commonly realised that members of the crafts so early held power.

Into the Fleet, down the still well-marked valley by Farringdon Road, ran a stream sometimes called the Fleet River; it is plotted on some of the earlier maps, and its course has been traced in detail by Mr. Waller.[35] In an agreement as to the land of the nunnery at Clerkenwell, made at the end of the twelfth century, this stream is unmistakably called the Hole-burn; its valley ran north and south by Clerkenwell, and the river and gardens of the Hospitallers of Jerusalem are said to have been upon it.[36] It gave its name to Holborn Bridge and to some extra-mural cottages near by, on the road which passed over it. The modern name should mean Hole-burn-Bridge Street, just as Fleet Street meant Fleet-Bridge Street. Holeburn Street is found in 1249.[37] Cottages at “Holeburne,” which had existed in the time of the Confessor, are mentioned in Domesday, and we may conclude that the Holeburn and Fleet had these names not only in King Edward’s day, but in Alfred’s. The upper part of the stream was also called Turnmill brook; it was the mill stream of London.

Stow also gives the name of the River of Wells to this western stream just described, saying: “That it was of old called of the Wells may be proved thus: William the Conqueror in his charter to the College of St. Martin le Grand hath these words, ‘I do give and grant ... all the land and the Moor without Cripplegate, on either side of the postern, that is to say, from the north corner of the wall as the river of the Wells, there near running, departeth the same moor from the wall, unto the running water which entereth the city.’”[38] He goes on to say that the stream (Hole-burn) was still called Wells in the time of Edward I., citing the Parliament and Patent Rolls of 1307; but on referring to the calendars of these documents I find that this name of Wells appears in neither. The first speaks of “the water-course of Fleet running under the bridge of Holburn,” and the second of them calls it “the Fleet River from Holburn Bridge to the Thames.” Moreover, the Hole-burn was far away from the north corner of the city wall by Cripplegate, and the land granted cannot have extended all the way to the present Farringdon Road (the bed of the old stream) and have included Smithfield. The land of “Crepelesgate,” taken by William Rufus and restored to St. Martin’s by Henry I., is probably the same, and to-day it may be represented by the parish of St. Giles. Surely the whole construction of the passage requires that the north-west angle of the walls should be the western limit of the land granted.

The Conqueror’s Latin charter is given in Dugdale, and in the passage used by Stow the stream is spoken of as rivulus foncium. Mr. Stevenson, in publishing a Saxon version of the same charter 1068 A.D.,[39] shows that rivulus foncium was a translation of the O.E. Wylrithe, meaning a small stream (rithe) issuing from a spring (wyl). This “Well-brook”[40] must surely have been intended, not for the western stream at all, but for the upper part of the “broke” running into the “burh” directly afterwards mentioned in the charter, the present Walbrook. Outside the walls the stream possibly ran in a west-to-east direction, and so formed the north boundary of the property against the moor.

Mr. Stevenson appears not to have been of this view himself, as he speaks of the Walbrook as “probably nameless” when the charter was written; but he points out that it was called Walebroc in a charter of Wulfnoth (1114-33)—“probably the Wulfnoth whose name is recorded in St. Mary Woolnoth.” This is a Ramsey charter (in Rolls series), and the terms are most precise by which Wulfnoth of Walebroc, London, sold a piece of land in Walebroc, “whence he was called Wulfnoth of Walebroc,” with a house of stone and a shop, for ten pounds of pence.[41]

St. John “super Walebroc” is mentioned about the same time in the St. Paul’s documents, and that Walbrook was then a proper name of some antiquity seems to be conclusively proved by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s legend that it was called after Gallus by the Britons, “and in the Saxon Gallembourne.” Altogether it can hardly be doubted that the Wyl- of the charter represents the modern Wal- in Walbrook.[42]

Within the walls the Walbrook ran right through the midst of the city from north to south, and divided the eastern wards from the western. It remained an open stream well into the Middle Ages; in 1286 an order was given to cleanse it “from the Moor of London to the Thames.” Its course is well defined by three churches, St. John’s, St. Stephen’s (formerly on a different site to the west, Stow), and St. Mildred’s, all “super Walbrook.” St. Margaret Lothbury also stood above it on vaults. Its relation to the present street is made clear in a document of 1291 regarding a tenement “between the course of the Walbrook towards the west, and Walbrook Street towards the east.”[43] The arch under which it entered the city through the wall seems to have been discovered. Roach Smith describes this opening thus: “Opposite Finsbury Circus, at a depth of 19 feet, a well-turned Roman arch was discovered, at the entrance of which on the Finsbury side were iron bars placed apparently to restrain the sedge and weeds from choking the passage.”[44]

The bed of the brook has frequently been found in city excavations, and its course has been laid down by Mr. T. E. Price.[45] It was of course crossed by many bridges; in 1291 there was an inquiry held as to the repair of one of them near the “tenement of Bokerelesbery.”[46] This stream was probably the first water supply of London, and it must have been a most important factor in the division of the wards and the laying out of the streets.

The Langbourne described by Stow is entirely mythical. As he named Holborn from a merely supposititious “Old-burn” running east and west, so also his Lang-burn has its only origin, as will be shown, in the corruption of a name (see p. 132). Here I need only say that its supposed bed occupies high ground, and no evidence of it has been found in excavations. Mr. Price points out that Stow himself allowed that the name was the only sign of it, and adds that the levels demonstrate that no such stream can ever have flowed there; indeed, excavations have shown that its supposed course was one of the most populous parts of the early city.[47]

Stow connects with it still another equally mythical stream, the Share-burne, on the site of Sherborne Lane, but I find this called Shitteborwe in 1272, and the last syllable must be “bury,” not “burn.”

Fords.—The best account of the Thames fords is given by Dr. Guest.[48] CÆsar tells us that the river called Thames was passable on foot only in one place, and this ford was defended against him by stakes. Bede says that the remains of the stakes were to be seen there “to this very day.” Camden suggested that the site of this ford was Coway Stakes, near Walton; King Alfred, however, in an addition he made to Orosius, says that CÆsar, after defeating the “Bryttas in Cent-land,” fought again “nigh the Temese by the ford called Welinga-ford.” Wallingford, where the Icknield Way crossed the river, was certainly the chief ford below Oxford. Dr. Guest showed that a place near Coway Stakes is called Halliford, and argued that although a Roman army, that of Claudius, may have crossed at Wallingford, CÆsar’s passage of the river was at the stakes, and the two passages of the river came to be confused in the tradition. The general argument is too subtle to go into here, but it is less than convincing to make Bede’s account of a ford where stakes yet remained in the river apply to CÆsar and the Coway Stakes, while Alfred’s applied to Wallingford and the army of Claudius, especially as we may suppose that a principal ford would be fortified if a lesser one were. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Sweyn’s army passed the river at Wallingford; here William the Conqueror also crossed; and here too it seems likely that the English invaders also first crossed.[49]

Another place nearer to London which is named from a ford is Brentford, but Dr. Guest thought that the ford so named was over the Brent instead of the Thames. He allows that the English army here twice crossed over the Thames in 1016, as recorded in the Chronicle, but argues that there was only a “shallow” in the Thames at this point, and that the ford was over the Brent. William of Malmesbury, however, seems to have anticipated all this by saying very distinctly “the ford called Brentford” and the “ford at Brentford” when speaking of the crossings of the Thames in 1016. Gough in his edition of Camden says that the Thames was easily passed here at low water.

Of a ford at Westminster, which from a mere unsubstantial hypothesis has swollen into quite a big myth in the pages of Sir W. Besant, there is not a scrap of evidence. There was, however, throughout the Middle Age a ferry here, and the name still survives in Horseferry Road. The Roman bridge at Staines (Pontes) may be the one, the existence of which is implied in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1013, and in 1009 we are told that the army went over the river at Staines.[50] In the Middle Ages there was a bridge between Staines and London on the river at Kingston, and Horsley thought that CÆsar crossed by a ford here.