Of mistaken views still largely or nearly universally accepted which will be traversed here, I may mention a few salient examples. For instance, Stow's opinion that London Bridge before the twelfth century was far to the east of the later bridge, and that the mural ditch was a mediæval work; Stukeley's opinion that the old approach through Southwark pointed on Dowgate, that Old Street was the great west-to-east Roman road, and that Watling Street in the city carries on the name of a street which formerly lay across its course, running from London Bridge to Newgate. From more recent writers, I may cite Mr. J. E. Price's idea that the Cheap was not at an early time a thoroughfare; Mr. J. R. Green's views,[1] as given in his _Conquest of England_, that Saxon London "grew up on ground from which the Roman city had practically disappeared"; that the Roman north gate and the north-to-south street were considerably to the east of the line of Bishopsgate and Gracechurch Street; and that the Tower of London was built by the Conqueror on "open ground only recently won from the foreshore of the river." The plan which accompanies these views is equally visionary; a large quarter of the city east of St. Paul's is lettered "The Cheap"; there is no Aldgate Street (now Leadenhall Street), the Langbourne appears as a stream, and there is a curious selection of churches, amongst which is St. Denis, for which we are referred to a note in Thorpe's _Ancient Laws_, regarding a gift of London property to the monastery of _St. Denis in Francia_. Mr. Loftie holds that Aldgate was first opened in the time of Henry I., and that no mediæval gate exactly occupied a Roman site; that the eastern road turned off outside Bishopsgate; that Ludgate was still more recent than Aldgate, and that it only opened on the Fleet river; that the Strand was not a route before mediæval days; that there was a Roman citadel on the high ground from the Walbrook to Mincing Lane, and that the Langbourne was a ditch to this stronghold. In the last book on the subject, called _Mediæval London_, we are again told of the oblique Roman Watling Street; Cheap is described as "a great square"; and it is assumed that not only the Langbourne, but the equally mythical Oldbourne, supplied the city with water. [Illustration: FIG. 1.--GODDESS OF HOPE (ROMAN BRONZE FOUND IN LONDON).] I have here only rapidly set down a few of the opinions which are still current[2]--views which are repeated, embellished, and amplified to distraction in more popular writings, and set out with much appearance of exactitude in most misleading maps. The whole question, indeed, of the early topography of London is overloaded on a quite insufficient basis of fact, and quakes and gives way under the least pressure of examination. CHAPTER I ORIGINS--THE LEGEND OF LONDON--THE BRITISH CHURCH--THE ENGLISH COME TO LONDON--ALFRED'S LONDON