Mr. Price thought that the wards were divisions dating from Roman days. Norton believed that the wards were to the city what the hundreds were to the shire, and this view, shared by Bishop Stubbs, seems to be confirmed, as will be shown by an independent line of reasoning. The wards can be traced back to within fifty years after the Conquest, and that they were even then of immemorial antiquity is shown by FitzStephen's legend that, like Rome, London was founded by the Trojans, and consequently had the same laws, and like it was divided into wards. In Cambridge there were ten wards in 1086. A study of the ward boundaries in connection with the Walbrook, the "Carrefour," and the main streets yields most interesting results. Stow tells us that a great division between the western and eastern wards was made by the Walbrook, which ran from the north wall to St. Margaret's Lothbury, then under Grocers' Hall, and St. Mildred's Church, west of the Stocks Market, through Bucklersbury, then by the west of St. John's Walbrook and the Chandlers' Hall, and by Elbow Lane to the Thames. On laying down the course of this stream from all obtainable data, it is found that it was an unbroken boundary between the thirteen eastern and eleven western wards. Again, the four principal cross streets form so many backbones to a series of wards; and this in such a marked way as to show on a good map quite certainly at a glance, that these wards were formed by aggregations of dwellings upon either side of the roads which passed through them, exactly as a high-road threads a village. Bridge Ward is a narrow strip containing the Bridge Street up to the cross of Lombard Street. Bishopsgate Ward, beginning at this same crossways, goes all the way to Bishopsgate, the ward street passing through its midst. Lombard Street and Fenchurch Street furnish the midrib to Langbourne Ward[141] in just as obvious a way. Stow thought that Langbourne Ward was called from a stream, but this has been shown to be untenable for physical reasons (see p. 48); and the plan of the wards shows instantly that here was no water-course, like the Walbrook, _dividing_ wards, but a street passing through the _midst_ of a ward. While deriving this _ward's_ name from a brook, Stow says that Lombard _Street_ was so called of the Longobard merchants about 1300. I find that the _street_ was called Langbourne Strate at the end of the thirteenth century;[142] and in a charter of Matilda to Holy Trinity, 1108-18, appears the Church of St. Edmund in _Longboard Strete_. The first mention I can find of the ward is also of the twelfth century; this is a demise by "Geoffrey, Alderman of the Ward of Langebord," of land in Lime Street.[143] It is evident from this that the name of the street and the ward was originally one and the same--Langbard, Longbord, or Longford, as it occasionally appears. The street was written "Lumbard Strete" in 1319.[144]