This was a famous bridge. No Englishman of the Middle Ages, and even of the Renaissance, ever spoke but with pride of London Bridge; it was the great national wonder; until the middle of the eighteenth century it remained (with the exception of some small ones which have disappeared as well as the narrow waters that they crossed)[21] the only bridge of the capital. It had been commenced in 1176, on the site of an old wooden {44} structure, dating back to Saxon times,[22] by Peter Colechurch, “priest and chaplain,” who had already once repaired the wooden bridge. The whole nation was stirred by this great and useful enterprise; the King, the citizens of London, the dwellers in the shires endowed the building with lands and sent money to hasten its completion. The list of donors was still to be seen in the sixteenth century, on “a table fayre written for posterity,”[23] in the bridge chapel. A little while before his death in 1205 another had taken the place of Peter Colechurch, then very old, as director of the works. King John, who was in France, struck with the beauty of the bridges of that country, and having heard of the magnificent bridge of Saintes which lasted till the middle of the nineteenth century, and which was approached by a Roman triumphal arch, chose, as successor to Colechurch, a Frenchman, called Isembert, “master of the Saintes schools” (1202). Isembert, who had given proof of his capacity in the bridges of La Rochelle and of Saintes,[24] set out with his assistants, furnished with a royal patent addressed to the mayor and inhabitants of London. John Lackland therein vaunted the skill of the master, a man, he said, “of both knowledge and honesty,” and declared that the revenue arising from the houses that he would build upon the bridge should be consecrated for ever to the maintenance of an edifice “so necessary for you and for all those passing thereby.”[25] [Illustration 8. PART OF LONDON BRIDGE WITH THE DRAWBRIDGE AND NONE-SUCH HOUSE. (_As it stood about_ A.D. 1600.)] {47}