In the main thoroughfares it was at some time or other found necessary to rank the houses, the stalls, and the selds, in line along both sides of the street; the earliest representation of Cheapside shows such a line. But with the bye-streets this was by no means the case. Their _raison d’être_ was the passage from one main artery to another. How did the merchandise get itself carried out of Thames Street and from the Quays? By means of the narrow ways from Thames Street north. Observe that these were for the most part straight, because the easiest way to carry a burden up a short hill is to take it with a run; the porters ran straight up the hill to Eastcheap and walked thence to London Bridge, Cheapside, the markets of London, and the high roads, north, south, east, and west. In other parts of the City the bye-streets were not always, or even generally, straight. Was it that the lane was formed by the proverbial cows following each other? Not at all. There was no cow, in other words, the cow was not consulted in forming the lane. It was for this reason. The craftsmen gathered together, each according to his own trade and with his fellows for convenience of production, price, and common furnaces and appliances; it was necessary that there should be a lane of communication from the place of work to the place of sale; the workmen, however, set up their houses, without much regard to this lane of communication, beside each other (see also p. 251), opposite to each other, at right angles, anyhow, and the lane wound its way through and among these houses; at first there were gardens behind the houses, but, when the ground became more valuable, courts and narrow streets were thrust through these gardens—Ogilby’s map of 1677 (see _London in the Time of the Stuarts_) shows in parts the very process of building through the gardens. We must again remind ourselves that in the early centuries there were no attempts to make the streets straight, except for those which were wanted for the main thoroughfares, and for convenience of carriage. Even as late as the seventeenth century, and after the fire, there were streets where the houses projected right across the roadway. In Mark Lane one house projected twelve feet. I have in some places thought that indications of the former projections may still be discovered, but cannot insist upon the theory in any single instance. Most of them, certainly, were either entirely removed or greatly reduced, and the houses were set in line after the Great Fire. Illustrations of the way in which a street wound and turned among houses, built without regard to line, may be found in many old villages; especially in Bunyan’s village of Elstow, where many of the houses are quite irregular, and the road (wider than a London bye-street) follows the houses rather than the reverse. In this way, especially, the lanes or narrow streets round the old Palace of Westminster and beside the river gradually made themselves.