You have heard the story how Augusta disappeared, and how the East Saxons found it deserted, and how London was born, not the daughter of Augusta at all. Augusta was childless. _APPENDIX TO CHAPTER I_ The principal Roman buildings consisted of a bridge, a wall, a fort at either end of this bridge, and two ports--Queenhithe and Billingsgate. No one knows when the bridge was built: the wall was not erected until some time between A.D. 350 and A.D. 369. At that time the area enclosed by the wall was covered with villas and gardens. The wall has been traced with certainty, and portions either of the original wall or the mediæval repairs have been found in many places, and may still be seen above-ground. The Roman remains which have been dug up consist of mosaic pavements, sepulchral cists, keys, toilet articles, lamps, fibulæ, amphoræ, domestic things, and a few bronze statuettes. Nothing whatever has been found to show that Augusta was ever a great city, in the sense that Massilia, Ephesus, Bordeaux, or Alexandria was great. FOOTNOTES: [1] See _The Two Lost Centuries of Britain_, by W. H. Babcock. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1890; an excellent little work on this subject. II SAXON AND NORMAN The citizens of New London--Augusta having thus perished---were from the outset a people of mixed race. But the Saxons, and especially the East Saxons, prevailed. Strangely, it is Essex which has always prevailed in London. The modern Cockney dialect, which says "laidy" and "baiby" for lady and baby, and "whoy" and "hoigh" for why and high, is pure Essex: you can hear it spoken all over the country districts of that little-visited county: it is a dialect so strong that it destroys all other fashions of speech, even the burr of Cumberland and the broad drawl of Devonshire. Saxon London was mainly East Saxon. But, besides the new owners of London, there was, first of all, some remnant of the scattered Welsh. I do not mean the miserable survivors of Augustan London, found in the place when it was first entered, but those Britons who had taken refuge in the forests of Surrey, Sussex, and Middlesex, and there lived as they could, until they could safely venture forth among their conquerors. Gildas, as we have seen, speaks of these people; and their skulls remain in the Saxon cemeteries to prove how great a Celtic element survived among the English conquerors. Next, there were the foreign merchants. This class formed a considerable proportion of the better class; and it grew larger every day, because the East Saxon was certainly not so sharp in affairs as the "man of Rouen;" nor was he in business capacity equal to the Fleming and the German. But as happens, _mutatis mutandis_, at the present day, those who were Flemings and the men of Rouen, speaking their own language, under Ethelred, had all become Londoners, speaking the English tongue, under Henry Beauclerk.