“But although London Bridge was an edifice to which there was a continual and heavy cost attached, yet its possessions were, even anciently, very extensive; for you find that so early as in the 23d year of Henry I., A. D. 1122, Thomas de Ardern, and Thomas his son, gave to the Monks of Bermondsey, and the Church of St. George in Southwark, the tenth of his Lord’s corn lands in Horndon, and the immense sum of Five Shillings per annum rent, out of the Lands pertaining to London Bridge. Calculate this, my good Sir, at twenty times its present value; for we know that in the Great Charter of King John, Chapter II. a knight paid but five pounds to the King as a Relief when he came to his estate; and _that_, Lord Coke tells you in his _Second Institute_, even several years later, was the fourth part of his annual income. Remember too, that sixpence by the week was then a living stipend to an ordinary labourer; that the Black Book of the Exchequer--which was written about the reign of Henry I.--ordains that a tenant shall pay one shilling to the King, instead of providing bread for one hundred soldiers for one meal; that the provender of twenty horses for one night, also to be paid by a tenant, was commuted for four pence; that in 1185, the tenants of Shireburn paid by custom two pence, or four hens, which they would; and, lastly, recollect, that in 1125,--called by Robert de Monte, the dearest year ever known,--a horseload of wheat was sold but for six shillings: in ordinary times, as in 1043, it was sixpence the quarter. Of all this you may see most abundant and curious proof, in Bishop Fleetwood’s ‘_Chronicon Preciosum_,’ London, 1745, 8vo. pages 55, 56; and therefore the gift of Thomas de Ardern was munificent. “I should observe that Stow obtained the knowledge of this donation from the manuscript ‘_Annals of Bermondsey Priory_,’ which are now preserved in the Harleian Library in the British Museum, No. 231, very fairly written in a good legible black text upon vellum; having vermillion rubrics of the King’s Reign, and the date of the year. It is a rather small quarto volume, of 71 written leaves, delicately paged by some later hand; and the passage occurs on the reverse of folio 11. The Harleian Catalogue calls it, in Latin, ‘the Annals of the Abbey of St. Saviour’s of Bermondesie, from the year of our Lord 1042, down to the year of our Lord 1433; in which, beside the public affairs of each reign,’--told in the words of other Chronicles--‘many things are narrated which belong to the history of the same Abbey.’