And what happened to Londinium, as the Romans called our city? We do not know, for there is a great gap in our history; probably it perished of starvation. We know that little by little the strangers increased their grip—the Jutes in Kent and Hampshire (and later in Surrey), the Saxons in Kent, Essex, and Sussex; and that as they did so London was gradually surrounded. Now London was a comparatively large place, with a considerable population, even after the Romans had gone; and the slow tightening of the Saxon grip must have meant starvation, for everything London wanted for its use came from a distance, owing to the impossibility of growing anything in the surrounding marshy districts. And in the absence of any reliable account we can only assume that in consequence the inhabitants little by little deserted the city, and made their way westwards; that the quays were deserted, the ships rotted at their moorings, the finely constructed streets were befouled with grass and briars, the splendid villas fell to pieces, the great wall in places crumbled to ruins. So that when eventually the Saxons did reach London, after years of struggle and fierce engagements, their victory was a hollow one. And there is much to support this assumption, for we find that in their chronicles the Saxons make practically no mention of the first city of the land, which they most assuredly would have done had it been anything other than derelict. Nor did they stay at London when they arrived. Probably such a place of desolation was of no use to them; they were not interested in ruined cities; they wanted open ground with growing crops. So they passed on, and London probably stood silent and dead for years, the empty skeleton of a city, while Time and Nature completed the ruin which savage assaulters might otherwise have carried out. Thus we may conjecture ended the first of London’s three lives. When, after a time, things settled down in Britain, a new London began to rise on the site of the old city. Gradually the folk, mainly the East Saxons, settled on the outskirts of the deserted city, and, little by little, they made their way within the old walls; numbers of the old fugitives crept back to join them; merchants came and patched up the broken, grass-grown quays; houses were built; and life began anew. Steadily the progress continued. At first the houses were rough wattle-and-mud affairs, set down in any fashion on the old sites, but gradually proper rows of small, timbered houses rose on all sides, with numbers of little churches dotted here and there.