Continuing our walk we overlook the Fleet River, which is much choked with filth and rubbish, especially from things thrown into it from the Fleet prison, whose walls it washes and whose refuse it receives. Perhaps after heavy rains it becomes a cleaner stream. Over against it rises the steep slope of Holborn crowned with its ancient church of St. Andrew. The broad road on which it stands is the military road, which branched off from the Roman road, when London Bridge was built. Formerly, and long after the building of the Bridge, the highway between the north and the south ran across the marshes round Westminster, and over Thorney Island itself. Ludgate—perhaps, we do not know—was built as a postern before the Conquest. It was rebuilt or strongly repaired, in the year 1215, by the Barons when they entered the City and pillaged the Jews, as already mentioned. Ludgate is now—in this fourteenth century—also a prison concerning which more will be said hereafter. The wall of London at first passed in a direction due south to the river from this gate, which was on the hill just without the Church of St. Martin. Between the wall and the Fleet was a small piece of wet and undesirable ground on which the Dominicans were permitted to settle; it was their precinct, outside the jurisdiction of the City. Presently the Friars were allowed to pull down the City walls beside them. This was in 1276. The King ordered the City to apply some of the murage dues to building a new wall on the banks of the Fleet, so as to include the House of the Dominicans. Three years later the order was renewed, yet the wall remained unfinished. The lack of zeal probably meant a growing disbelief in the importance of the wall, especially that part of it which overlooked the muddy banks and the mouth of the Fleet. The wall, however, was finished in due course.