The length of the High Street is relieved by the “Stonebow.” There was always a gate here from Roman times onward, for when the Roman town was extended southward to a good deal more than twice its original size, it was here that the new wall crossed the Ermine Street. The road had crossed the swampy ground and forded the river, and was now about to enter the city and climb the hill. The mediæval gate which succeeded the Roman ‘porta’ was removed in the fourteenth century, and the present one dates from the sixteenth, and was repaired in 1887, at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. It has one central and two side arches, with slender towers between, carried up to a battlemented parapet. On the east tower is a tall figure of the Archangel Gabriel, and in a niche on the other tower the Virgin Mary. The patroness of the city and cathedral is represented treading on a dragon. A long room above the arch with timbered roof is used as a Guildhall; in it are portraits of Queen Anne and Thomas Sutton of Knaith, founder of the Charterhouse. The corporation, to whom they belong, has had a long and distinguished existence, for municipal life in Lincoln began in Roman times; and when they left, and Saxons, Danes or Normans ruled, and the counties and towns had to adopt new names under each successive conqueror, Lincoln retained throughout her Roman name and her right of self-government. The corporation, besides their fine Restoration mace, have three civic swords, one apparently made up out of two, but said to have been presented by Richard II. when he visited the city in 1386, to be carried point uppermost, except in presence of the sovereign. [Illustration: _The Stonebow, Lincoln._] [Sidenote: THE CIVIC SWORDS] [Sidenote: THE “FOX”] The facts about the swords are these: the Charles I. sword, supposed to have been presented to the city at the beginning of the Civil War, in 1642, has been mutilated to supply a new blade to the Richard II. sword. This was done by order of the mayor in 1734. The blade has on it the orb and cross mark and also the running wolf—a fourteenth century German mark—but so common was it on the foreign blades used in England in the sixteenth century that, the figure being taken for a fox—as wolves were not then common in England—the term “Fox” was transformed to the sword; hence in Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” act iv., scene 4, we have Pistol saying to his French prisoner on the field of battle:— “O Signieur Dew, thou diest on point of fox.” and in one of Webster’s plays we have— “Of what a blade is’t? A Toledo or an English fox?”