By this dreadful accident, and other circumstances, this new stone bridge was in so ruinous a condition, that King Edward I. granted the bridgekeeper a brief to ask and receive the charity of his subjects throughout the kingdom, towards repairing it: besides which, he caused letters to be wrote to the clergy of all degrees, earnestly pressing them to contribute to so laudable a work; but these methods proving ineffectual, he granted a toll, by which every foot passenger carrying merchandize over the bridge, was to pay one farthing; every horseman with merchandize, 1d. and every saleable pack carried and palling over, a halfpenny. But while these affairs were in agitation, the ruin of the bridge was completed, by five arches being borne down and destroyed by the ice and floods, after a great frost and deep snow in the year 1282. However, the drawbridge, which had at first a tower on the north side, and was contrived to afford a passage for ships with provisions to Queenhithe, as well as to prevent the attempts of an enemy, was begun to be built in the year 1426; but about ten years after two of the arches at the south end, together with the bridgegate, fell down; and the ruins of the latter still remaining, one of the locks or passages for the water, was almost rendered useless; whence it received the name of the rock lock, which has occasioned the citizens to take it for a natural rock; and indeed though these ruins have lain in the water for above three centuries, they are still as impenetrable as a solid rock. From that time the buildings on the bridge increased slowly; for in 1471, when Thomas Fauconbridge the Bastard, besieged the bridge, there were no more than thirteen houses besides the gate, and a few other buildings erected upon it. However, in Stow’s time, both sides were built up, and it had the appearance of a regular street, there being only left three openings, with stone walls and iron rails over them, to afford a prospect east and west of the Thames. These were over three of the widest arches, usually called the navigable locks. Thus we see that the bridge in Stow’s time nearly resembled what it was before the houses were lately pulled down: and the continuator of Mr. Stow observes, that it continued in the same state till the year 1632; when on the 13th of February, the buildings on the north end of the bridge to the vacancy on both sides, containing forty-two houses, were burnt down by a maid servant’s carelessness, in setting a tub of hot sea-coal ashes under a pair of stairs, at a needle-maker’s near St. Magnus’s church: this fire burnt very furiously, and there being a scarcity of water, occasioned by the Thames being almost frozen over, these buildings were all consumed within eight hours.