The best authorities agree that to Alfred rather than to the Romans must be ascribed the foundation of London as it was during the Middle Ages, and as, in a sense, it is still. Stow, as far back as the reign of Queen Elizabeth, citing some long-lost document or tradition, tells us that Alfred found London empty. He, to use a very modern expression, “restored” the walls. He rebuilt them with the material at hand, namely, the material with which another Saxon king had built the church of St. Alban. The Saxons had disdained to fight behind walls in their conquest of the degenerate and Romanised Britons. But the Danes were as fighting men equal to the Saxons. Some advantage was needed before the Saxons could overcome their formidable invaders. He saw two important points to be gained by the restoration of London: first, that his new city would be virtually impregnable by the Danes; secondly, that the situation would be that from which he could best defend the whole valley of the Thames. As the Thames rises in Gloucestershire, and runs thence to Essex and Kent, this was to defend all his English dominions. We say now that to hold the Nile is to hold all Egypt and much more. In those days, when the river was the chief highway, to protect the Thames was to protect Kent, Wessex, and Mercia. I have mentioned hunting as an art. Alfred had an eye for a hunting country, as we say now. London was seen by him as we see Pevensey, a ruined wall enclosing nothing. There may have been vestiges of a church. There may have been the piers of a bridge. There can have been little else. Alfred made the bridge into a fortress, renewing the great timbers which had connected the piers. The bridge stood a long way farther down the stream than the modern London Bridge, and to defend it the king built a tower at the south-east corner of the restored wall. William the Conqueror, like Alfred, saw the advantages of the site, and here he placed the tower which still stands, a relic of his reign, a reminiscence of that of his great predecessor. The Roman roads through the city, and the gates by which they made their exit, no longer existed, or, at best, were ruined and useless. He made one road diagonally from the bridge across his market-place to Westgate, which we know as Newgate. A second road led to what we still call Bishopsgate, some distance westward from the site of a Roman gate which opened on the old roads to Lincoln and into Essex. His corn-market, where there was a weighing-stone for wheat, stood to the west of the Market Place or Cheap. A road along the northern side of the Cheap was in existence so soon after Alfred’s time that it must have been planned if it was not made by him. We call it Cheapside, and here there are traditions of a king’s palace near the spot where, centuries later, the great men of the city began to assemble in their Guildhall.